Bula Choudhury

Bula Choudhury (Born- 1970, Hugli, India) is a former national women's swimming champion of India. She is the first woman to cross seven seas. She twice swam the English Channel first in 1989 and again in 1999. She was awarded the Arjuna Award in 1990. She is now is planning to establish a swimming academy in Kolkata. She is a Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) legislator from Nandanpur in West Midnapore district in West Bengal. She was also awarded Padma Shri award.

Her first national competition, at age nine, she dominated her age group by winning six gold medals in six events. She continued to improve, winning various junior and national championships, as well as six gold medals at the 1991 South Asian Federation Games. Chowdhury started long-distance swimming in 1989 and crossed the English Channel that year. She won the 81-km (50- mile) Murshidabad Long Distance Swim in 1996, and in 1999 she crossed the English Channel again. In 2005 she became the first woman to have swum across sea channels off five continents—including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cook Strait, Toroneos Gulf (Gulf of Kassándra) in Greece, the Catalina Channel off the California coast, and from Three Anchor Bay to Robben Island near Cape Town, South Africa).

References

• India Info page on Bula
• Times of India article
• India News article