A planned "celebrity fight" between two former contestants from the first Singapore Idol back in 2004, Sylvester Sim and Steven Lim, will not take place after all.

The bout between the two was supposed to take place at the inaugural Asia Fighting Championship (AFC) on Saturday (Sept 23) at Marina Bay Sands.

A day before that, a press release said it was cancelled and that the cancellation was because the AFC organisers were unable to provide sufficient insurance coverage for Sim.

According to the statement, the decision to pull out of the fight was made by by the organisers and Sim's management agency, SGEE Ventures "after careful considerations of the potential risks involved".

Sim, 34, declined to comment when contacted. He is a partner in SGEE Ventures, an events and exhibition and talent management company, and also heads the music team at Unplugged, a live music bar in Dempsey.

In the past few weeks, he and Lim,41, have been taunting each other on social media. They also gave interviews in which they insisted that the planned fight would be serious, and was no publicity stunt. Both said that they have been training at Muse Fitness Singapore, a local Muay Thai gym, which is also one of the organisers of AFC.

Lim, who regular puts up videos on YouTube, is set to continue with the fight and will be up against the president of World Bodybuilding and Physique Federation Singapore, Mr Pradip Subramanian, 32.

Sim released a Mandarin album, Take Flight in 2005, a year after he lost to Taufik Batisah in the Singapore Idol final. He also did a stint as a resident performer at now-defunct Mandopop club Dragonfly. In 2014, he auditioned for Sing! China, then known as The Voice of China but did not get through.

He was caught in a controversy early last year (2016) when a man claimed that the singer was having an affair with his wife. Sim, who is married and has a 10-month-old daughter with a dance teacher, denied the allegations, which arose just before he released his comeback Mandarin single, A New Hope.