Despite Schooling's woes in the pool, Singapore sport still alive and kicking

Singapore

IT was a day when Singapore's Olympic hero became a zero, and the country's sports scene suffered a major body blow. People had reason to be downcast, disheartened and discouraged about their fallen idol.

The reality of Joseph Schooling's below-par showing at the recent World Swimming Championships in South Korea is understandably hard to swallow.

The 24-year-old has been Singapore's sports poster boy for some eight years now with his stupendous showings at all multi-sport Games, with the pinnacle being his Olympic gold medal that he won in such style at the Rio Games in 2016.

He has always wanted to do the country proud. He has often carried the red-and-white flag high. He has been Singapore's global sporting icon.

That being the backdrop, we cringe when we scrutinise his times and placings at the world championships, and freeze with dubiety.

Like a true-blue sportsman, Schooling accepts his failures and he is determined to right the wrongs and put himself back in the reckoning for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

That's the semangat (Malay for "full of energy, enthusiasm, and determination") spirit expressed by a rare Singapore breed last week, and it was manifested in three other sporting cases which should erase the hovering despondency among us.

First, the fabulous showing of our Putra Cup golf team that scored a memorable double in Hanoi.

Wire-to-wire was how Nicklaus Chiam strangled the individual title, his massive contribution also helping the Singapore quartet to wrest the team title.

The intensity of those triumphs is palpable. For a major vacuum was created when three former winners - Gregory Foo, Marc Ong and Joshua Shou - moved to the professional ranks last November. But Chiam and company filled the wide gap within months by overshadowing also perennial winners Thailand.

Nicklaus joined Phua Thin Kiay (1969), Mardan Mamat (1993), Choo Tze Huang (2006, 2011), Quincy Quek (2007), Jonathan Woo (2012) and Gregory Foo (2015) on a selected Singapore winning list.

On that same day on July 27, a Singapore success story of a different dimension emerged from Malaysia when a local football coach led a foreign team to the Malaysia FA Cup title.

In front of a record 83,520 crowd at the Bukit Jalil Stadium, Aidil Sharin, the former coach of Home United, saw his new team, Kedah, bang in an injury-time winner to defeat Perak 1-0 in the final.

It's an exceptional feat, and Aidil and his players are said to be in line for a RM1 million (S$335,000) bonus. Aidil follows in the footsteps of a selected few, a tradition started by the legendary Choo Seng Quee in the 1960s.

A day later on July 28, Singapore celebrated wildly again. The national cricket team got the better of overwhelming favourites Nepal and cruised to the five-team ICC World T20 Qualifiers Finals crown to secure a place in the Global Qualifiers.

Singapore beat Qatar and Malaysia, and the match against Kuwait was abandoned because of rain at Balestier Road.

A Singapore whitewash in the final match was feared as Nepal enjoyed a 12-position rankings advantage. After all, landlocked Gurkha-land is bordered by Test-cricket playing neighbours India and Bangladesh and ranks just outside the world's top-10 cricket countries.

But Singapore turned the tables with a mere formality, winning easily by 82 runs. The atmosphere was captivating; flags fluttering, banners unfurling and the continuous chants of "Singapore".

To cap it off, there was a moment of magic yet unseen here. Singapore's Janak Prakash produced an acrobatic catch when he leapt high on the long off boundary and held the ball single-handed near the boundary rope.

The near-1,000 crowd aside, the action was captured by over two million website followers. It was epic, to say the least. So bring out the semangat spirit, because Singapore sport is still very much alive.