Transcript of Remarks by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam at Book Launch of ‘Sport In Singapore: Visions for Change’ and Exhibition in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of Sport Singapore

I thank everyone who has contributed to this impressive 50 years of sports in Singapore. The past and current management and staff of SportSG. The whole sporting fraternity, especially the sportspersons and coaches.

I thank Nick Aplin too for the great labour of passion that went into this book, and your team. It's a very important record of not just the facts, but the spirit and the emotions behind what has been achieved.

I want to add a couple of remarks on top of what Minister Edwin Tong has just said. I do believe our best years are ahead of us in sports. And as the Minister said, it is important to us in many ways. Most importantly it's important to us emotionally – for us as individuals, as teams and as a nation.

Sports are a powerful way in which we develop that emotional resilience and character, develop the team spirit and ultimately develop unity. It has been and it will be, and we want to take it to a much higher level. I think the plans you have laid out are very promising, and a lot is going to be in the doing.

What we have today is vastly different from what we had 50 years ago or even 25 years ago. We have far better infrastructure, far better technical support for sportspersons, better coordination or the whole sports ecosystem, spotting and grooming of talents.

We have a lot more today than in the old days. And it's producing some outstanding results. We see it in recent years. Whether it's Joseph Schooling or Yip Pin Xiu or Shayna Ng, Shanti Pereira, Max Maeder – still very young - and many others. They're also pointing the way forward.

And as we go forward, there are two lessons we draw from where we were in the early years. We have far better facilities now, far better technical support, far better coordination including getting individuals together across the boundaries of schools as Minister Edwin Tong just mentioned. But there are also two lessons from the past that are worth reflecting on, and which are also opportunities for the future.

The first is about the sheer grit and determination of those exceptional individuals and teams of the early years. The ‘OGs’, as we might call them - the ‘original gangsters’ – with their old-fashioned exceptionalism and sheer grit and determination.

If we take athletics as a good example. Look at what was achieved with so little. Training on a just a bitumen track at Farrer Park and with very limited technical support – they had wonderful coaches, Maurice Nicholas, Tan Eng Yoon, Patrick Zehnder - but so much was about motivation. Yet they achieved levels of excellence that were not broken for decades, over four decades in many instances.

Think of Chee Swee Lee’s gold medal in the Asian Games in 400 meters - it was almost half a century later before Shanti Pereira achieved the same. Or Swee Lee’s 800 meter national record in 1976 - still holding today after 47 years. If you think about what C. Kunalan achieved - it took more than three decades for U.K. Shyam to break his record in the 100 meters. Our 4x400 meters men's national record, made in the 1974 Tehran Asian Games, held till this year when it was finally broken. Or Glory Barnabas, who held her 200 meters women’s record until Shanti broke it in 2015.

Likewise in football, from Quah Kim Song to Fandi Ahmad, they had something extra. In hockey, from Douglas Nonis to Melanie Martens, and not forgetting Annabelle Pennefather.

They all had that X factor, that grit and determination, that I'm sure we have within us and can rekindle.

And with today’s far superior infrastructure, coaching, technical support, coordination, spotting of talents, I think we can achieve much higher levels of excellence in the years to come. On top of that much broader participation that Minister Edwin Tong spoke about too.

A second dimension that's worth reflecting on, and which is an opportunity, is multiracialism in sports. Several of our sports were more multiracial in the earlier days. Football is an example.

I think we can recreate that too, and go even further. Part of the way is through what Minister Edward Tong was talking about - broadening participation across school boundaries. But it will also require a conscious effort to build multiracial participation and teams.

When we compete internationally, we are competing against many different nationalities and ethnicities. But in Singapore, we are still too ethnically defined in several of our sports. Some were traditionally like that, but need not be like that in future, and some were previously more multiracial and have become now less so.

That’s an opportunity for the future. There will be benefits in making various sports more multiracial.   

First, so we don’t miss out on potential talents. But there's another reason for it, which gets us back to the emotions that are evolved in sports. When we plough the multiracial field in sports, we're also developing a deeper team spirit in Singapore. The sports are one of the ways in which we achieve this.

We’re poised for new levels of excellence and a much broader level of participation than we achieved before. We are building on the successes of the old years and of recent years, and we can achieve something special for Singapore through the sports. But let's think about that old-fashioned grit and determination - how we rekindle it and allow individuals, and their parents who support them, to sustain it as they grow up. Second, let's plough the field of multiracialism in sports a lot more, let work more actively to deepen the Singapore spirit through sport.

Once again, thank you for everything all of you have contributed, including many of the old-timers. I see S.S. Dhillon sitting quietly in the second row. He and many others who are here contributed greatly to Singapore sports. Thank you very much.