Singaporean athletes go for gold at the 24th SEA Games. Alan Grant gets the story on three of the country’s medal contenders 

The 24th edition of the SEA Games, a mini-Olympics for 11 South-East Asian nations, takes place from 6 to 15 December in the north-eastern Thai city of Nakhon Ratchasima (commonly known as Korat). Hopes are high that a strong Singaporean squad can bag even more medals than the 129 it won at the last games in Manila in 2005. 
Time Out Singapore talked to three of our country’s best chances for medals: veteran bowler Remy Ong, star sailor Siobhan Tam and young cyclist Low Ji Wen. 

Remy Ong 
After winning two gold medals at last year’s World Bowling Championships in Busan, South Korea, and breaking a world record in the process with his score of 1,524 pins in a six-game series, Remy Ong has higher expectations placed on him than other members of Team Singapore. But that suits him just fine. ‘I’m the kind of athlete who, if you put more pressure on me, then I’ll actually bowl the extra mile,’ says Ong, 28, Singapore’s 2007 Sportsman of the Year.

Still, he admits that the pressure is definitely greater when bowling for Singapore than when he competes as an individual: ‘You have to carry the flag. It’s not just for yourself, but for the whole country.’ 

A pro since the age of 16, Ong has had his ups and downs. He first came to national prominence in 2002 after winning three gold medals at the Asian Games, also coincidentally in Busan. But Ong then went through a lean two years, where he didn’t play up to his previous high standards and failed to win any titles. Having weathered that storm, he knows that his triumph at the World Championships last year doesn’t guarantee success now. ‘You might bowl your best today, but you might not win. Bowling is kind of like golf,’ he says. ‘You can’t have your best game all the time.’ 

Siobhan Tam 
In 2005, Siobhan Tam teamed up with Dawn Liu to win the International 420 Class girls sailing event at the SEA Games in the Philippines. This time around, she prefers to be master of her own ship, and she’ll sail solo at this year’s games in the Olympic class Laser Radial category.

‘The last time I was just a crew member,’ says Tam, 20. ‘I moved to Laser because I wanted to be at the helm.’ Both boats are of a similar size, but while the 420 Class vessel has a crew of two, the quicker and lighter Laser Radial boats are manned single-handed. After the strong showing by Singapore’s sailing community at last year’s prestigious Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, where they came home with ten medals (including five golds), more success is envisioned in Thailand. Tam, however, is playing down her chances. ‘I want to win, but I’m not the favourite. There’s a Malaysian girl who is really strong,’ she says. 

Tam, who is studying business at SMU, first got into the sport seven years ago when a teacher suggested she had the perfect physique for sailing. It was love at second sight. ‘I was quite scared the first time I went out, as it was really windy,’ she recalls. ‘But the next time was better, and I knew sailing was for me.’ 

To the landlubber, steering a Laserclass boat looks quite hazardous – sailors perch precariously over the water with only their lower legs inside the boat. Tam does it quite expertly, but has a strange confession for someone who spends so much time on the water. ‘I’m not a strong swimmer,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Just yesterday I fell in, but that’s unusual.’ 

Low Ji Wen 
Don’t let Low Ji Wen’s slight stature fool you. The 18-year-old, who will be Singapore’s only road cycling representative in Korat, is one tough cookie. 

Knowing only a smattering of French, he dropped his studies, left home for the first time and relocated to France for five months earlier this year – just to ride his bike. And this was no plush US-style college sports scholarship with fancy dorms, top-class facilities and a large team of coaches. Low stayed in a spartan former monastery, where he and other young cyclists ‘slept wherever we could find space’. Low, who was 17 at the time, admits it was difficult at times and that he got quite homesick, having never been away from his family before. 

‘But I went to take advantage of the higher level of training over there,’ he says of the intensive training regimen. ‘I was training with a club team and racing every weekend, which is a lot different to racing occasionally here in Singapore.’ 

He was an instant success. ‘To begin with, they put me in the lower of the two junior grades. But I won my first race, and so they promoted me to the higher level,’ says Low, who’ll begin his National Service in January. 

Success seems to come naturally to Low, who only got his first road-racing bike at age 14, a combined birthday/Christmas present from his parents. In little over a year, just after his 15th birthday, he finished fourth in his first-ever race, an event for Singapore’s best under-19 riders. 

Less than three years later, this past August, he was racing in Mexico at the World Junior Road Race Championships for under-19s. He finished a solid 41st out of 115, but could have placed higher, if not for having to stop to repair a puncture in the latter part of the 133km race as he was riding just behind the leaders. 

Low has put in long hours on his bike in preparation for the SEA Games, training six or seven days a week for up to five hours a day. And he’ll need all the training he can get – he’s racing in two events in Thailand: the Individual Time Trial and the Road Race. He likes his chances best in the latter, even though the odds are stacked against him. 

‘Obviously, I hope that I can win it, but it will be tough,’ he says. ‘I’ll be on my own, whereas some of the other strong teams like Vietnam and Thailand will have seven or eight guys in their teams, meaning they can ride for each other.’ Don’t count him out. 

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