Test of Endurance
Meet the young athletes championing niche sports and representing Singapore at the international games
Meet the young athletes championing niche sports and representing Singapore at the international games
When Joseph Schooling won Singapore’s first Olympic gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the country celebrated along with him. It didn’t matter where you were or who you were with, the energy then was infectious, and his win became the topic on everyone’s lips—with each conversation filled with praise and admiration.
Of course, there have been other sporting achievements since.
At the 2019 Southeast Asian Games, the Quah siblings clinched top honours with record times: Jing Wen emerged victorious in the women’s 200m butterfly race; Zheng Wen broke the national record in the men’s 100m backstroke; Ting Wen was triumphant in the women’s 100m freestyle race—making it a spectacular family affair.
These are but only a handful of stories from the Singapore sports scene, but each record-breaking milestone demonstrates the power of sports in bringing everyone together. Behind these wins are a tremendous amount of effort and discipline from the athletes who are flying the Singapore flag high— with some excelling in sports that most of us don’t even know about.
With many of our young athletes participating in the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics this year, we catch up with them and highlight the rising stars in niche sporting categories who are slowly but surely starting to turn heads.
In 2018, he bagged a bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games, and two golds in the Asian Para Games.
Toh shares: “The social stigma against disability is often misplaced. It’s because people see the Other where no Other exists. People with disabilities are regular people: we do certain things differently, yet we have dreams like everyone else. I do not have a disability; I feel I have none. Hence, I have never paid much attention to it. It was never something worthwhile to make an exception of.”
Having an early start in the sport at the age of two also means that Toh isn’t able to fathom a life without it. “The sport becomes part of you,” he shares. “It’s second nature to swim, compete, and deal with the anxieties that accompany them.”
Trainings are tough, and Toh admits that swimming can be an unforgiving and cruel sport. But hard work pays off, and this month, Toh makes his debut at the Paralympics in Tokyo. To him, there is an underrated value in the Paralympics as compared to the Olympics. “Both tell stories of perseverance, struggle and overcoming [the odds], but the former has an added dimension. A Paralympian has weathered not only harsh training, but the difficult gauntlet of breaking assumptions in a way that Olympians do not reach. This isn’t to downplay the Olympics either, but rather to draw attention to the Paralympics with its powerful brand of storytelling—each chapter with an exceptional narrative power that is underused.”