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Title Sporting heroines: The 1990s Author(s) Nick Aplin Source Sports, November/December 1999, pp.9-13 Published by Singapore Sports Council This document may be used for private study or research purpose only. This document or any part of it may not be duplicated and/or distributed without permission of the copyright owner. The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. This article was submitted as the last of a five part series published in “Sports” (Singapore Sports Council’s monthly magazine). Sporting Heroines: The 1990s Five part series published in ‘Sports’ (Singapore Sports Council’s monthly magazine) November/December 1999, p.9 – 13 The 1990s: Widening Horizons and the Shift towards Excellence Introduction The last decade of the second millennium has witnessed greater female participation in sport than ever before. More women have been competing in the Olympic Games and the opportunities for increasing the range of activities is better than ever before. At the time of the first female Singaporean Olympian, Tang Pui Wah (1952 - Helsinki), only 8% of all competitors at the Games were female. A gradual upward trend has been reported since then, and by 1996 the figures had risen to 34%. This trend has largely been replicated in Singapore but only recently has there been regular participation. In Singapore, there was a down-turn in the fortunes of women in competitive sport during the 1980s. In swimming, the regional successes of the early years of independence came to an abrupt halt after the 1983 SEA Games. There were no gold medals at all in 1985, 1987, 1989, and 1991. Lost opportunities, particularly the Olympic boycott in 1980, which had denied athletes like Junie Sng and her contemporaries the chance to participate on the ultimate sporting stage provide one explanation. Another is that the economic recession in the mid-Eighties reduced the financial resources available and changed personal priorities. It can easily be assumed that this hiatus had a direct impact on the inspiration and commitment of potential athletes at the time. By 1986, it was deemed that no female athlete had attained a high enough level of achievement in any sport to justify the award of Sportswoman of the Year. The state policy of Sports For All generated a greater awareness and a wider variety of sports for the population. For example, the rapid growth of squash and then ten-pin bowling, was to produce a number of the most famous and successful local female Singaporean athletes, notably Lim Seok Hui, Mah Li Lian, Adelene Wee, and Grace Young. But they were competing in non-Olympic sports, and ironically the general pattern of diversification may have drawn talented athletes away from the well- established activities that relied on a bigger talent pool to produce elite performers – an example might well be the case of track and field. For all the active encouragement of sport and recreation at the grass-roots level it became apparent that a re-evaluation of the status elite sport was necessary. The Advisory Council for Sport and Recreation produced a report in 1989 and the immediate consequence was a renewed drive towards excellence. The initiative manifested itself most clearly and cogently in the introduction of the SPEX 2000 plan of 1993. This final article in the series of Sporting heroines focuses on some of the early beneficiaries of the SPEX 2000 programme. The six Olympians presented here began their involvement in sport before the Advisory Council Report. However, as pioneers of the movement to 1 enhance and re-define sports excellence, they were at the same time privileged and pressurised by the infusion of grants, incentives, and awards during the middle years of the decade. With an increasing amount of public money being directed towards the development of individual athletes, there were a number of issues that confronted sport. Perhaps the most significant was the heightened public interest in the performances and personalities of talented young athletes. Not necessarily a new issue, this trend thrust these young women vigorously into the media spotlight, whether they liked it or not. The two Olympiads of the Nineties were the largest ever, with increasing opportunities for women to participate. The 25th Olympiad was held in the Catalonian capital of Barcelona in 1992. One hundred and seventy two countries were represented. The Barcelona Games introduced three young Singaporean athletes to the global stage. Joscelin Yeo and May Ooi extended the tradition of swimming as the strongest sport in Singapore, whilst Zarinah Abdullah was the first beneficiary of the introduction of badminton to the Olympic programme. Joscelin and Zarinah, who were to experience both positive and negative representation from the press during their sporting careers, would later become the first female Singaporeans to be double Olympians. Joscelin Yeo Joscelin was born in 1979 and pursued her education at the Methodist Girls' School, emulating her two predecessors from the 20th Olympiad in Munich, Pat Chan and Tay Chin Joo. Her two brothers, Leonard and Gerard, were active in the sports arena, but it was the exploits of Joscelin, the 'Shark', that caught the imagination of the sporting public so emphatically. Learning to swim competitively at the Tanglin Club from the age of seven, Joscelin's first successes were achieved in 1986, and characteristically, while she enjoyed the process of winning, she did not take lightly to losing. Single-minded and willing to take risks, she was dubbed Jaws-lin by her brother Leonard. Joscelin developed her skills under the guidance of the late Kee Soon Bee, who described her as very easy to train and very disciplined. The future two-time Sportswoman of the Year was a member of the People's Association Youth Swimming Club in Toa Payoh and by 1993 she was not only the most visible and famous national swimmer since Junie Sng, but also the one under the most pressure – an almost natural consequence of expanding media exposure. At that time, publicity often caused embarrassment and discomfort. And as public expectations were always high and the press tended to focus on her aloofness as much as on her performances, she was thrown, somewhat unwillingly, into the public gaze. In terms of performances, the Inter-Primary competition of 1991 marked the emergence of this phenomenal record-breaker. The Asia Pacific Age Group Championships provided the first international opportunities for Joscelin to make the headlines as a National Open record holder. Joscelin was the first Singaporean female to dip under 60 seconds for the 100 metres freestyle, and her first senior regional medal was a Bronze in the SEA games held in Manila in 1991. Joscelin was still only 12 years of age. The days of one country dominating the sport of swimming were past by the time the Barcelona Olympics took place. The USA, the German Democratic Republic, and Australia 2 had each demonstrated dominance in the pool, but this time eighteen countries were to boast a medallist and the Chinese women claimed their first ever gold medals. Asian swimmers took five of the titles with the diminutive Kyoko Iwasaki of Japan, who won the 200 metres breaststroke, signalling clearly that physical size was not the significant factor in swimming that it might be in other sports. With her inclusion in the team for Barcelona in 1992, Joscelin was more than the heir apparent to Junie Sng, who sadly had never tasted the Olympic experience. Joscelin set new personal best times and age-group records almost at will. In four of the six events she had entered, Joscelin set a new national record and a personal best. For many observers, Joscelin inspired the collective adoration of the Singaporean population during the SEA games of 1993, when she won nine gold medals. Joscelin's 200 metres Individual Medley time placed her 19th in the world and it helped to elevate her to the status of Sportswoman of the Year in 1993, a feat that she was to reproduce two years later. Her times in competition were well in line with the medal-winning horizon necessary for the Asian Games to be held in Hiroshima the following year. Voted Sports Girl of the year in 1994, Joscelin experienced the joys and frustrations of high level competition. She achieved one of her finest performances in winning the bronze in the 100 metres butterfly at the Asian Games. Her time of 1 min 1.62 seconds gave her a world ranking of 28th and represented an improvement of .55 of a second on her own best performance. The race itself was won by Liu Limin (China) in a time of 58.38 seconds, with Qu Yun, also of China, taking the silver in 58.70 seconds. However, at the Commonwealth Games held in Canada, her best was only good enough for fourth place. In 1995, the SPEX TAP (Talent Assistance Programme) provided financial support for a move to Melbourne in Australia, where Joscelin could train under Bill Nelson (a successful coach at the Australian Institute of Sport) and pursue her education at Melbourne Girls' Grammar School. This move away from the dual pressures of academic study and being a sport celebrity in Singapore actually marked the beginning of a period of intense work and a mixed set of swimming performances. Joscelin returned to compete in the SEA Games at Chiangmai later in 1995 and she rose majestically to the occasion. She took seven individual titles setting six new SEA games records. The only disappointments, and they were considerable to the team-oriented Joscelin, concerned the narrow defeats at the hands of the Thai team in the Freestyle and the Medley Relays.

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