At 5am on Thursday nine-year-old Shristi Singh plunged into her school swimming pool in the northern Indian town of Dehradun. This was to be no ordinary morning dip — she climbed out again 16 hours and 33 minutes later.
Having covered about 25 miles (40km) non-stop, according to Mandeep Singh, her delighted coach, Shristi found herself at the centre of a row with child rights activists questioning whether the swim — completed in front of cheering crowds and television crews — could have damaged her health.
Mr Singh said that Shristi wanted to become the youngest person to swim the Channel — a record held by Thomas Gregory, who achieved the feat aged 11 years and 11 months in 1988.
“Now that she has swum non-stop for 16 hours I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t go for the Channel,” Mr Singh said. He added that Shristi trained for up to eight hours a day.
“You don’t get champions by swimming for two or three hours a day,” he said. “Look at Chinese children who compete in the Olympics — what age do you think they start training?”
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Comparisons were drawn with another Indian child sports prodigy, Budhia Singh, who ran 40 miles in seven hours when he was 5, in 2006.
A local government official said: “This is very much like Budhia’s case. Swimming continuously could damage the child’s organs and retard her growth. We don’t encourage such feats.”
As Budhia shot to global fame he became the object of a legal battle between his coach and foster father, Biranchi Das, and activists who alleged that the boy was being exploited. The state government resolved the matter by banning Budhia from running marathons and taking him into care. Budhia, now 8, lives in a state-run hostel in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the northern state of Orissa. He is not allowed to run more than two and a half miles a day or to compete in races.
Mr Das, who claimed to have rescued Budhia from a man who had bought him from his impoverished mother for 800 rupees (£10) to work as a labourer, was murdered last year. The trial of his alleged killers began this week.
Shristi’s father, Brij Lal Singh, a mechanical engineer, rejected any suggestion that he had forced his daughter to swim but said that he would encourage her to pursue the sport if she wanted to.
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“Nobody knew me but now I am getting calls from all over the world,” he said. “It’s all because of her. May God bless her with more success throughout her life.
“We have set our sights on Olympics and will prepare accordingly.”
India is yet to excel in any Olympic water sport. The country has only ever won one individual gold medal at the Games — in shooting last year.
“If she can make money by swimming, what’s wrong in that?” he said. “Whatever she makes it would be peanuts compared to what cricketers get in India.”