Singapore's sports odyssey, from amateur games at the Padang to Olympic triumphs

Straits Times

20 hours ago

Weightlifter Tan Howe Liang (left) was Singapore's first medallist at the Olympics, clinching a silver at the 1960 Rome Games. It took the Republic another 56 years before it finally struck gold, courtesy of swimmer Joseph Schooling at the 2016 edition in Rio de Janeiro.
SINGAPORE - Worn and faded though they may be, these ordinary objects at the Singapore Sports Museum at the Sports Hub would tell extraordinary stories if they could speak.
The shuttlecocks with frayed feathers, for instance, helped Wong Peng Soon to his four All England titles in the 1950s.
Chee Swee Lee's blue spike shoes from 1974 are torn and faded. That was the year she won an improbable 400m gold at the Asian Games in Tehran, becoming Singapore's first female Asiad champion.
A white singlet, still pristine, clad the late weightlifter Tan Howe Liang, who won Singapore's first Olympic medal, a silver, in Rome in 1960.
However, even if these artefacts cannot speak, the feats they bore testament to were covered in glorious detail in the pages of The Straits Times.
News of Chee's victory ran on the front page on Sept 16, 1974, with the report noting that the publication's switchboard was flooded for the result long before her race even took place.
Chee Swee Lee's blue spike shoes and medals at the Singapore Sports Museum at the Sports Hub, and the story about her victory that ran on the front page on Sept 16, 1974.
PHOTOS: ST FILE, JONATHAN WONG
A last-minute cramp that almost derailed Tan's Olympic medal bid was retold in a behind-the-scenes article titled ' The 'miracle' in Rome' .
Wong's breakthrough All England triumph in 1950 made the front page on March 5 under the succinct headline 'Wong wins title'. In the years that followed, more pages were devoted to his achievements.
Badminton player Wong Peng Soon, seen here in the Thomas Cup finals in 1955, was one of Singapore's early sports stars. He won the prestigious All England Championships four times.
PHOTO: ST FILE
When he announced his retirement on July 15, 1955, the publication paid tribute to his legacy and 'a life of almost spartan severity' in which he played each stroke 'thousands of times till perfection was acquired and the grace of an artist was added'.
Until Wong's rise in badminton, beginning in the late 1930s, however, The Straits Times in its early days paid only modest attention to sport.
Wong Peng Soon's shuttlecocks and badminton racket, on display at the Singapore Sports Museum at the Sports Hub.
ST PHOTO: JONATHAN WONG
This, even though the history of organised sport in Singapore dated back to 1826 when the country's first sports club was founded – the Singapore Yacht Club. The first known organised game, cricket in this case, was played in 1837 by the British at the Padang, then known as the Plain.
Such was cricket's popularity that it made its way into The Straits Times on July 29, 1846, a year after the publication's founding. A small announcement on Page 2 reported an upcoming match between 'Young Singapore and the military gents'. It was one of the first mentions of sport in the publication, an unheralded introduction to what would become some of the better-read pages.
When Singapore's football team defeated Selangor to win the inaugural Malaya Cup on Oct 1, 1921, it was reported only two days later in a single column on Page 10. The front page that Monday was instead filled with advertisements for 'pure Devonshire cyder' and 'pure beef dripping'.
Wong's success on the international stage, however, fired up the country. Support began to increase for home-grown talent.
The first South East Asian Peninsular (Seap) Games held in Bangkok in 1959 gave local athletes a platform and brought them into the public eye, in an era when amateur sportsmen and women aspired to bring glory to Singapore.
As Tan told a reporter many years after his Olympic success: 'I'm no hero. I was just a keen young man eager to win for my country in the Olympics.'
While Tan stayed grounded, Singapore began to dream bigger. Three years after his Olympic breakthrough, the Government announced plans for a National Stadium in Kallang. It would eventually cost $50 million and open in July 1973, just in time to be the centrepiece when Singapore hosted the Seap Games for the first time soon afterwards.
'Sheares opens Seap Games' ran the front-page headline on Sept 2, with photographs of the fully packed 50,000-seater stadium and the colourful opening ceremony graced by then President Benjamin Sheares filling pages.
A new generation of athletes, such as track runner C. Kunalan and swimmer Patricia Chan, were also becoming household names in post-independence Singapore.
It was not just their sporting exploits at home and on the international stage that were regularly chronicled and celebrated. Post-retirement, Chan directed and sang in her own musical which The Straits Times c overed in its entertainment pages while Kunalan's wedding in 1966 also made the news.
Singapore sprinter C. Kunalan was chosen to light the cauldron at the newly opened National Stadium during the opening ceremony of the 1973 Seap Games. It was the first time the country was hosting the event.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Growing up as a football fan in the 1980s and into the 1990s, when most games were not telecast live, Mr Paul Antony Fernandez, 59, a part-time security officer, relied on The Straits Times for reports of the lead-up to matches, the matches themselves, and – most crucially – the scores.
'There was no internet in those days,' says Mr Fernandez.
'Any news we wanted about the Lions, we got it through the newspaper. If there was a match on Saturday, I would make it a point from Wednesday morning to get The Straits Times and The New Paper every day to find out who's injured, who's playing. Everything about the team.'
His wedding in 1994 took place on Dec 17, the very day the Lions were playing Pahang in the Malaysia Cup final at Shah Alam Stadium in Selangor.
To ensure that his guests – many of them die-hard football fans like himself – would turn up for the wedding dinner at the former Great Eastern Hotel in MacPherson, he hooked up his parents' 17-inch Nordmende colour TV in the wedding hall.
Just like those Lions fans, The Straits Times did not hold back on the euphoria when Singapore won that final, 4-0. The photo of the triumphant captain, Fandi Ahmad, holding the trophy aloft, was accompanied by the headline 'Lions crowned soccer kings' on the next day's front page while the sports section was filled with more stories and graphics recreating two of the goals.
Abbas Saad saluting Lions supporters at the Shah Alam Stadium after Singapore beat Pahang 4-0 to win the Malaysia Cup in 1994.
PHOTO: ST FILE
It was the Republic's first Malaysia Cup win since 1980 – that victory came with the front-page title 'A night to remember' – and also its last, as the Football Association of Singapore decided to withdraw from the competition in 1995.
In a column headlined 'A special first in the techno-era of Cup', the sports desk's Yap Koon Hong proudly – and perhaps prematurely – declared: 'It is not hard to see why the Lions can drop defeat from their vocabulary like, well, a bad habit.'
Despite football's ups and downs, the turn of the century marked a golden era for Singapore sport.
From 2002 to 2006, Singapore won 44 Asian Games medals, only slightly less than half the number it had won in the previous 50 years. Then came a breakthrough team silver in women's table tennis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the nation's first Summer Games medal since Tan Howe Liang in 1960.
Two more Olympic medals followed in London 2012, thanks again to Feng Tianwei and her fellow table tennis players, before the defining moment for the country: swimmer Joseph Schooling's
historic gold medal at Rio 2016 .
Besides extensive coverage of Schooling's Olympic campaign in print, The Straits Times – in a sign of the online age – would add a gold medal to the masthead of its Facebook profile. It also produced several interactive graphics about the butterfly specialist, with one winning an Award of Excellence at the US-based Society for News Design's annual competition.
As Schooling told the world's media after his race in Rio de Janeiro: 'Even people from the smallest countries in the world can do extraordinary things.'
Indeed, the little red dot continues to punch above its weight. Yip Pin Xiu's
dominance in the pool with seven Paralympic gold medals and counting, Loh Kean Yew becoming
a badminton world champion, Shanti Pereira's
200m Asian Games gold, and Maximilian Maeder's
kitefoiling bronze at Paris 2024 have all elevated Singapore sport to greater heights.
Shanti Pereira's victory in the 200m final at the Hangzhou Asian Games in October 2023 was a breakthrough moment. It was Singapore's first athletics gold medal since 1974, when Chee Swee Lee won the women's 400m.
ST PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG
In all these triumphs, The Straits Times has had a front-row seat, telling the stories of sacrifice, hard work and perseverance.
These stories became a nation's, too.