Seventeen year old Aniqah Gaffoor had been making waves in the Sri Lankan pools recently. Her journey, even though in its budding stages, has already taken her to the highest level of competition: The 2021 Summer Olympics.
Aniqah has begun swimming from the tender age of five and has always shown a liking towards butterfly events. Even though she was born here in Sri Lanka, she spent most of her childhood in Malaysia, before moving to Thailand in 2018, where she is now a Grade 10 student, studying at the United World College in Phuket. The reason for her move to Thailand was the fact that she was awarded the FINA Scholarship for 2020/21. This resulted in Aniqah having to train at Thanyapura in Phuket, Thailand, which is a FINA-approved high-performance training facility, under the guidance of Spanish coach Miguel Lopez and Alexander Tikhonov from Russia for the last three years.
Aniqah competed in Sri Lanka for the first time in 2018 at the National Age Group Swimming Championships where she began to establish her name in the local swimming fraternity. She broke her first national record at the 55th Malaysia Invitational Age Group Swimming Championships for the 50m butterfly event in 2019. Two weeks later, she broke her own record for the 50m butterfly (29.10s) and established a new national record for the 100m butterfly (1:04.58s) at the 50th Singapore National Age Group Swimming Championships.
In 2019, Aniqah represented Sri Lanka at the 2019 World Aquatics Championships held in Gwangju, South Korea. She competed in the women's 50 m butterfly and 100 m butterfly events, but couldn’t perform up to her expectations as she had a bout of influenza during the championships. In the same year, she also won one silver medal and one bronze medal at the 2019 South Asian Games in the 4x100m Medley Relay and 100m Butterfly events respectively.
Starting from 2019, Aniqah has persevered throughout the entire pandemic period by maintaining her fitness at home and has begun her usual onsite pool training since the December of last year. With the announcement of her participation at this year’s Olympics under the Universal Wildcard category, she is excited and is ready to give her best effort at the Games and is training fervently to do so. We at Mora Spirit would like to wish her all the best for the upcoming Olympic Games which will begin in a few days.
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