Dipna Lim-Prasad, holder of 400m and 400m hurdles national records, calls it a day
Singapore’s national 400m and 400m hurdles record holder Dipna Lim-Prasad has announced her retirement from the sport at the age of 27.
She said in a Facebook post on Wednesday (19 December) that after 17 years of competitive athletics, 13 as a national athlete, she believes “it’s time to take a step back” and focus on starting a family with her husband, former national sprinter Poh Seng Song.
“I’m hanging up my spikes and calling time on competitive athletics for now, and look forward to the next phase of life,” she wrote in her post.
“I’ll take with me a lifetime’s worth of highs and lows, and will forever take heart in the fact that I was able to do my bit to help raise the bar in Singapore athletics.”
Record-breaking sprinter
Lim-Prasad started out in the shorter sprints, and held both the national 100m hurdles and 200m records. During this phase of her career from 2008 to 2014, her best achievement was breaking Prema Govindan’s 29-year-old national 200m record of 24.54sec, when she clocked 24.36 at the Singapore Under-23 Open Track and Field Championships in 2013.
By then, she had started to move up to the 400m events, and lowered the 400m hurdles national mark on numerous occasions. In the 2013 SEA Games in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, she became the first Singapore woman to win an individual track medal, matching Heather Siddons-Merican’s 400m hurdles bronze in 1979. Her time of 59.96 also made her the first Singaporean to finish the event in under a minute.
She would go on to win two silver medals in the 400m hurdles at the next two SEA Games. Arguably her greatest achievement also came at the 2017 SEA Games in Kuala Lumpur, where she smashed Chee Swee Lee’s 43-year-old national 400m record, lowering the 55.08 timing set at the 1974 Asian Games to 54.18 en route to winning a silver. She considers it the favourite race of her career.
Her last record-breaking feat came at the Jakarta Asian Games in August, when she ran a sub-59sec timing in the 400m hurdles for the first time, lowering the national mark to 58.93.
‘Politics and stresses’ in the past year
While Lim-Prasad insisted that many factors have contributed to her retirement decision, she told The Straits Times that there were “a lot of unnecessary politics and stresses” in the past year.
Last year, she had filed a complaint against then-Singapore Athletics technical director Volker Herrmann, saying she felt the German had been undermining her coach Luis Cunha throughout the season.
“Things just kept happening and it came to a point where I started enjoying training less,” she told The Straits Times. “All you really want to do is train and try to deliver at whatever platform you’re competing at for your country. You don’t want to have to be stressed about strange selection criteria or last-minute changes.”
Nevertheless, she insisted in her Facebook post that she is proud of herself for pushing through, no matter how many times circumstances made it easier to just call it quits there and then.
“I’ve always tried to be someone worthy of flying Singapore’s flag on the track, and hope that I’ve done so as well as I could. It’s never been smooth sailing, but it has always been rewarding,” she wrote.
Remaining involved in sports
In her post, she thanked her husband Poh, coach Cunha, and her current sponsors. A Nanyang Technological University sports science graduate, she will remain involved in local sports through her role on the Singapore National Olympic Council’s athletes’ commission and as co-founder of In My Shoes, which redistributes used sports shoes to those in need.
And she left the door open for a possible comeback, saying, “It’s so long for now for competitive athletics, but I know I could never leave the sport. It’ll always remain a part of me.”
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