Over the years, the sporting world has produced athletes of the highest quality, spanning every sport. They have made us proud, time and again, with the greatness of the records they’ve achieved. Some of those have been pivotal in putting a country on the world map and some others in reinforcing our supremacy in a sport. Some of those, however, are so special that they stand the test of time, undefeated, across generations.
Sadly, while we all seem to appreciate Michael Phelps' accomplishment of 23 gold medals and 28 overall, we quite simply forget the feat of our very own Mihir Sen. A lawyer by profession, Sen is one of the very few swimmers who attained worldwide fame for this sport. In fact, he was the first Indian long-distance swimmer and also the first Asian to cross the English Channel way back in 1958.
Sen was only 28 when he crossed 31-mile stretch from Dover to Calais in 14 hours and 45 minutes. Not only that, in 1966, the Padma Shri awardee set out to swim the seven seas across the five continents in one calendar year.
Inspired by America's Florence May Chadwick, he swam across the Palk Strait that extends for 40 miles and became the first ever swimmer to do so. Soon after that, he swam the 40 km stretch of the Strait of Gibraltar, that connects Europe to Africa, in 8 hours and one minute.
Sen followed that by swimming across the 72 km stretch of Dardanelles and then Bosphorus (Istanbul Strait) which connects Europe and Asia. He finally completed the record by swimming the Panama Canal, which is between North and South America. In a time when there were no wetsuits, Sen showed unnatural levels of endurance (in choppy waters at that) and lived life on the edge.
Eleven years later, the Communist Party of India requested him to join and campaign for them. But Sen being an anti-communist turned down the offer and contested as an independent candidate against the future Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu. After losing the polls, Sen's garment business was targetted and the factory forced to shut down. False cases were initiated against him and his house and office were raided repeatedly by the police and their assets seized.
The shock affected him deeply and Sen met with a lonely death, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for 17 years. The most disquieting part of the whole situation is that it did not take long for the nation (or the Government, who did not offer any monetary support during his suffering) to forget the legendary swimmer's achievements.
