Prateek Tanmay
4 min readHyderabadMay 25, 2026 07:27 PM IST
Most fathers talk about their children’s achievements. R Madhavan talks about what his son Vedaant Madhavan had to give up to get there.
In a recent conversation with Kumudam, the actor spoke with unusual directness about the life Vedaant leads as a competitive swimmer. Not the medals and the records, but the daily texture of what produces them. And through all of it, one thing Madhavan kept returning to: “I have not told him to do this.”
He explained, “Vedaant chose swimming himself. He chose the early mornings, the strict diet, the two-a-day sessions. From the age of 12, he started taking protein shakes and began practicing rigorously, not because a parent pushed him toward it, but because he had already decided this was what he wanted. The discipline was never imposed. It was built from the inside.”
“He has to swim eight hours a day,” Madhavan said. “He has to maintain his diet. He has to sacrifice a lot as a teenager that most other teenagers don’t have to.” The morning session and the evening session are fixed points around which everything else is arranged.
Vedaant Madhavan’s passion for sports
The social life reflects this just as clearly. If there is a party that runs past 10 pm, Vedaant would not go. Madhavan pointed to this not as a hardship, but as proof of something more important. His son is not missing those nights reluctantly. He is skipping them because he loves what he is doing. When sacrifice stops feeling like sacrifice, Madhavan suggested, that is how you know a person has found the right thing.
As Madhavan put it in a conversation, “Vedaant’s day ends at eight o’clock, and then he’s up again at four in the morning.” That rhythm, day after day, is the actual job.
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Beyond the physical demands, Madhavan also spoke about what makes swimming mentally unlike almost any other sport. “Swimming is a very different line compared to other sports,” he said. Take cricket, he explained. A batsman has variety, the space between deliveries, fielding positions to read, a game that gives constant external information.”
Giving racing as another example, Madhavan said, “In racing, at least you can see how your opponents are doing. But in swimming it is very difficult to track.” A race can be decided by 0.1 or 0.2 of a second, and you often do not know which way it has gone until the wall is already behind you. In long-distance Olympic events, the problem deepens. “There is no way of knowing if you are going faster than your speed,” Madhavan said. You are inside the effort with no mirror, no gap to measure, no competitor in your eyeline to tell you whether what you are doing is enough.
To handle this, Vedaant mastered stroke counting, tracking each arm pull through a race to regulate pace and effort entirely from within. It is the kind of sustained internal focus that most people would find exhausting to maintain for sixty seconds, let alone across hundreds of metres of a competitive race.
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Vedaant Madhavan’s monk-like training
“It is a very focused sport,” Madhavan said. Because of that, he observed, something happens to the people who commit to it seriously. “In this process they become like monks.” Not in a formal sense, but in the way they learn to exist without noise, without distraction, without the constant stimulation that defines most teenage life. The sport does not just train the body. Over time, it reshapes the person doing it.
Vedaant won his first international medal at 12, a bronze at the Thailand Age Group Swimming Championships. He is now a national record-holder and has won gold at the Danish Open, five gold medals at the Malaysian Open, and multiple medals at domestic competitions.
