Singapore's gold medals in the pools no fluke, says Malaysian coach

SINGAPORE: Synchronised swimming may be a subjective sport but Malaysian coach believes Singapore’s two team gold medals are by no means a fluke.

Coach Long Yan believes that Singapore’s investment in synchronised swimming is beginning to pay off handsomely.

And the Chinese coach is hoping that synchronised swimming will get more attention in Malaysia as well, since the country will be hosting the 2017 Games.

“Singapore has definitely improved a lot,” said Long Yan after watching her team settle for silver in both the team events.

“For team events, they’ve been training really hard for more than a year ... probably because they’re the hosts.

“But we can all see that they’ve improved tremendously in terms of sychronisation and presentation.

“It also helps that they have a large pool of swimmers to choose from. That’s a luxury we don’t have. We could only field nine swimmers because that’s all we’ve got ... Singapore fielded the maximum 10 and still had two reserves.

“I believe our biggest problem is the depth of talent. There are only four states – KL, Selangor, Negri Sembilan and Penang – who have development programmes for synchronised swimming.

“That limits our options in national selections and many of those who come to Bukit Jalil also quit because they find the training too tough.

“With Malaysia hosting the SEA Games in two years’ time, I hope more states will start their own synchronised swimming programmes because it will definitely benefit everyone,” she said. 

The Star