After Olympic heartbreak, Singaporean swimmer Chantal Liew turns pain into inspiration

Find out what’s new on ST website and app.

Open water swimmer Chantal Liew being given nutritional drinks during a race using a modified fishing rod on Aug 4, 2021.

PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO

Summary

• Chantal Liew missed Olympic qualification by 1.7 seconds after sickness disrupted her training.
• Open water swimming is physically demanding involving drinking dirty water, battling fatigue and dealing with mid-race fueling via fishing rods.
• Liew uses the 1.7 sec defeat as motivation, highlighting the athletes ability to turn pain into inspiration for future competitions.

AI generated

If you want a tale of heartbreak, don’t go fumbling in the romance section of a bookshop. Just ask any athlete and they’ll tell you. About chances missed, bad breaks, last-minute goals. About emptiness, tears, splintered dreams. About a pain which they can precisely measure for you.

In open water swimmer Chantal Liew’s case, it’s 1.7 seconds.

Ask and she’ll autopsy her heartbreak for you, just take you back to late 2023 when her form was strong and then sickness hit in Portugal. “Insane gastro” followed, nausea, inability to eat, waking up weeks later in 2024 for the Olympic qualifier in Doha with a sore throat, mentally accepting her Games dream was done.

Then the race began and it “was the best I’ve ever swum internationally at the start of the race”. Miracle? Nope. The past, all the diarrhoea she’d had, how sick she’d been, returned to ruin her present. Her strength faded, her charge wilted. She and the Chinese swimmer Xin Xin were fighting for an Olympic place and as the finish line beckoned they both