WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!

They might not come along every day, but Singapore has had its fair share of world sporting champs, across a handful of different sports.

Indoor Skydiving

The latest world beaters are the Singapore indoor skydiving team, who in April this year won multiple golds at the world’s largest indoor skydiving competition, held in Belgium. The team’s Kyra Poh is already a world champion (you should see her tear up the iFly facility on Sentosa!), and she figured heavily in the gold medal haul.

Badminton

In December last year, 24-year-old Loh Kean Yew won the 2021 BWF World Championships to become the men’s singles world champ – the first Singaporean to achieve the feat. He follows in the footsteps of Wong Peng Soon, who won the All-England Championships four times in the 1950s.

Swimming

Singapore’s pool stars include Ang Peng Siong, who in 1982 became the world’s fastest swimmer with a 22.69-second lap in the men’s 50m freestyle at the US Swimming Championships. More recently, Joseph Schooling won an amazing Olympic victory (Singapore’s only Olympic gold to date) at Rio in 2016, when he beat Michael Phelps to the wall in the 100m butterfly. And then there’s the incomparable Yip Pin Xiu; she has won all five of Singapore’s Paralympic gold medals!

Table tennis

After grabbing a history-making silver at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Singapore’s women’s table tennis team took on the might of China in the final of the 2010 World Team Table Tennis Championships in Moscow, and stunned the defending champions 3-1, becoming the new world champs.

The list doesn’t end there: Aloysius Yapp is currently the number one ranked pool player in the world; and ten-pin bowler Shayna Ng won gold in the women’s singles at the world championships in November last year (beating another Singaporean, no less). Oh, and then there’s 54-year-old Peter Gilchrist, who moved here in 2003, became a Singapore citizen in 2006, and went on to become a six-time world champion in English billiards!