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Report card for Team S'pore at the SEA Games

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The 26th SEA Games will come to a close on Tuesday and Singapore’s athletes will no doubt be reviewing their performances. While some will be relishing their record-smashing victories, others will be doing a whole lot of soul-searching.

For Singapore’s sports honchos, one area they might want to consider reviewing is whether the Republic should turn its focus from football to other sports where home-grown talents have performed impressively at this year’s SEA Games.

Perhaps it’s time more resources and money are given to sports that are not as popular as football but where many diamonds in the rough could eventually shine.

For instance, 18-year old Sasha Christian became the queen of waves when she grabbed gold in wakeboarding, while the roller sports team also did well enough to impress; likewise Gary Yeo almost won gold at the 100m sprint event but had to settle for silver.


Similar to how the Media Development Authority helps film makers and studios tie up with Hollywood and other big players, local sports officials can perhaps help these unsung heroes gain more prominence in Singapore and help market them for extra revenue for training, etc.

Some of these athletes may not be at the Olympic level or even at the Asian Games standard yet but they have proved their mettle at the SEA Games, so if more resources are not set aside to support them, how can they develop?

On the other hand, despite the hype surrounding our Young Lions, they proved to be the biggest disappointment at the games when their roar became a whimper at the Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta as they crashed out of the group qualification stage.





They weren’t exactly pegged as favourites by punters but were nonetheless still tasked by football chiefs to reach the grand final.

Their main reasoning for their early knockout was a lack of time to prepare. 

That might be true, but still, their performance based on their first two matches against Malaysia and later Cambodia seemed uninspired. They showed momentary glimpses of promise and flashes of brilliance — but these were always limited to brief periods within the second half. Their strategy seemed amateurish at best, pumping long balls upfront and lacking creativity and zest.

Coach Slobodan Pavkovic’s comments during post-match press conferences were just as disturbing.

After a poor and lackluster performance against Malaysia, he told reporters he was happy with his team’s performance, and that against Malaysia they really couldn’t have done much better.

After the Cambodia match, where they had 75 per cent possession of the ball and only managed to win by one goal, Pavkovic referred to his squad’s performance as “excellent”.

I wondered whether he was talking about the same matches.

It’s time to call it as it is: the team’s failure to enter the semi-finals is unacceptable in a country where football is king of sports.

Another team that did not meet expectations was the fencers. They targeted five gold medals but didn’t even get one.




Fencing chief Nicholas Fang told Yahoo! Singapore that he will speak to the team and they will review what went wrong and rectify the situation.

The shooting team also faltered. Shooters had difficulty keeping focus, suffering misfires or getting distracted by camera clicks of photographers. They too, like the fencers, will be reviewing what went wrong.

It will be interesting to find out the results of these reviews when they come out, perhaps in a month’s time.

Nonetheless, there remains still plenty to shout about exceeded expectations.

Swimming, table tennis and sailing ensured 62 per cent of the gold medals won in Indonesia by Singapore.




The swim team managed to turn into a dream team of sorts – a mixture of men and women who delivered Singapore’s best ever SEA Games outing with 17 gold medals.

16-year-old Joseph Schooling became an overnight sensation when he beat the SEA Games record for the 200m butterfly, becoming the first athlete at the games to automatically qualify for the London Olympics when he met the ‘A’ qualification mark.

Tao Li, with her seven gold medal feat, gets the “top performing athlete‟ title out of some 5,000 athletes from 11 countries taking part in the games.

The table tennis team maintained their dominance by winning all the gold medals on offer.

The canoeing team bagged 10 medals.

The waterpolo boys made sure they didn’t lose the title as SEA Games champs since 1965.

Fu Mingtian became the first Singaporean to win the women's badminton singles at the SEA Games.

The keglers did well, too, as did the sailing team.

If we want to continue adding to the list of sports where Singapore shines, perhaps now is the best time to promote sports like wakeboarding and roller sports at schools and at a community level to create a new culture to propel such sports further.

Less focus on football and more on sports like wakeboarding perhaps? Sacrilegious, some would say.

But I reckon it would be a uniquely Singaporean thing to do.