Yip Pin Xiu: The water warrior

The swimmer slips smoothly off her wheelchair and onto the pool deck. Her coach helps tuck her hair in. A nose clip is attached. Paddles are tugged on. This place, the pool, is her factory, a place of unforgiving labour where she comes to design greatness. Her body has been long tested in competition and is racked by a nerve disease, but with religious repetition she keeps propelling it down a 50m highway of water.

It’s mid-March and Yip Pin Xiu, 33, and 17 years from her first Paralympic gold, is still grinding in the OCBC Aquatic Centre. Still accumulating metres (2,000 on most days). Still finding the energy to tease her coach.

“Can I go home?” she grins.

“No,” Mick Massey, an Englishman, scowls in jest.

He yells encouragement. Stopwatches measure decimals. Blood is taken mid-session and lactate is measured. Bungee cords are tied to her to provide resistance.

“She can do things,” says Massey, “that nobody else can.” Then he tells the story about her training camp in Sydney in 2024. It’s just before the Paris Paralympics, when the training’s been rough and she’s tired and they have a 12 x 50m set at hard pace the next day.

Massey decides to exchange it for a lighter set, but Yip won’t budge. She’s insistent on finishing the hard set. “It was,” he remembers, “one of the special moments because she absolutely blitzed it. The times were season best times.” An athlete exhausted but committed. Later, she says, “I won’t let somebody give me the excuse that, okay, you can rest today and do it tomorrow.”

It’s because her talent has shone so persistently that she became the youngest Nominated MP in Singapore, has a waxwork in Madame Tussauds, is told by 70-year-old ladies on the MRT how inspiring she is and has seven Paralympic gold medals and one silver.

But the greatest heroes are the hungriest and she wants more. On Sept 21 begin the World Para Swimming Championships in Singapore and the little girl who’d compete to see who pushed the lift button first still wants to race. But it’s not, you see, about whether she wins, but about her spirit which is unstoppable.

On the water Yip floats, as still as a water lily. Like the flower, she belongs here. Then the videographer bends down and she critically studies her turn on an underwater camera. She isn’t happy with it.

“Let’s do it again.”

Her art is obscured by water, so we must dip into her world. Over a period of seven months from January to July, a Straits Times team films her in the OCBC Aquatic Centre and Singapore Sports School pools, records her gym workout and invites her and Massey to the studio to unravel her race.

What we found is what you can’t see. Underneath that grin lies a knuckle-duster of a competitor. Or as Massey calls her, “ultra competitive”.

Take the story about the Italian at the 2024 Paralympics.

Massey hears about this new competitor, goes to have a look and mentions her to Yip at dinner. But, as he recounts, she tells him, “I’m not interested.” Later, Yip explains, “I didn’t want to hear it because I didn’t want it to distract me. I did not want to start thinking, ‘what if the person is faster’?”

Champions are complex and Yip is many people. The emotional human who once cried in a toilet leading up to the Tokyo Paralympics after watching a race of hers. Yet also the collected competitor who Massey says “can control her emotions really well”. When it’s race time she evolves into a different beast.

Ask her what’s happening to her body during a 100m backstroke race and her answer is profound.

“My hands are hurting, my breathing is hurting.

“(But) my brain is not hurting. I love it. I love racing.”

In the water she is free, but also ferocious. In Beijing, at the 2008 Paralympics, she won gold at 16. In Paris, at the 2024 Paralympics, she won two golds at 32. It’s as if she keeps plugging herself into the electricity of the moment.

“I feel that sometimes when people don’t race well it’s because there is a mental block. They can train really well... but when it comes to racing in front of the audience, knowing that there are expectations, sometimes people just can’t do it. But I think I thrive in front of a crowd. I enjoy the atmosphere. I like the buzz.”

Everything takes time with Yip. Everything requires adjustment. Her disease, Charcot-Marie Tooth, is a nerve disorder which weakens muscles especially in the arms and legs. But nothing stops her. Tenacity has beaten disorder.

Her hands are now clawed and so, fine, she’ll text using her knuckles. She can’t grip a weight bar so she wears a strap on her wrist into which a hook is sewn. The hook is attached to the bar and then she pulls.

Pull down. 26kg. Five sets of five.

Bench pull: 12.5kg. Five sets of five.

Her strength and conditioning coach Tan Jei Min hovers and grins. “She’s very innately driven,” she says as she helps Yip attach a cuff around her arm which restricts blood flow and helps build muscles faster.

When Yip talks swimming, she almost never dwells on her disease. It’s there everyday, it’s her life, it’s who she is. But it’s never an excuse for why she may be a little slower, never a justification for the tiredness she feels, never an exemption from living a full life.

Gym is a drag some days when her body feels beaten up but it’s non-negotiable. Discipline is her hymn. She works with Tan and also sport physiologist Steve Chow, dietician Olivia Wong, biomechanist Dr Ivan Ee and psychologist Brian Miller and her goal is uncomplicated: How can I be better?

She wears an Oura ring which gives scientists information on her heart rate, oxygen saturation in her blood and stages of REM sleep. “She’s the most monitored athlete we have,” says Chow. “But with elite athletes you can’t tell them to train more, they’re already doing it. So we look for marginal gains because 0.01 of a second is the difference between first and second place.”

Last year before Paris, Massey asked Chow how long it took to get Yip ready to race when she lands in a new country. “We looked at the sleep data,” says Chow, “to try and determine when she’s ready to compete after she changes time zones. We worked out that she needs at least one day per two hours change in time zones. This meant that a staging camp in a similar time zone, such as Manchester, was needed before the Paris Games, to allow for earlier adaptation.”

Did this science work? Who knows, but this is what happened.

One day in ST’s office, we all watched a replay of her 100m backstroke final from the Paris Paralympics. Her rival is catching up and Yip watches intensely. It’s telling that even though she won the race, this video clip was triggering her.

“It’s the first time I’m properly watching it. It’s so scary”.

She won gold by 0.06 of a second.

Yip wheels into ST’s office, smile on face, fist out for a bump. But before her video interview there’s a short pit-stop at the hair stylist. It’s the perfectionist in her: She’s been slogging all week, fatigue collects and she doesn’t want to look tired for the camera.

Detail consumes her and data intrigues her. Whether it’s lower heart rate or lactic acid levels, she wants to know. What is excellence we often argue and it is all this, the homework, staying great even as age plays havoc and negotiating whatever life throws at her.

Like solitariness.

The day we film at the Singapore Sports School no one is there. The pool looks like glass and then she breaks the water. Most swimmers train in packs, laughing, stretching, competing, comparing. On this day, like most days, she’s alone.

“When you’re on your own in the water,” says Massey, “it’s 10 times harder to push yourself than when you’re in a squad. It’s absolutely phenomenal.”

If it’s a day with a hard set he’ll text her in advance to gauge how she’s feeling on a scale of one to 10 and then perhaps adjust the set. “One means tombstone,” laughs Yip as in she’s feeling dead. “Ten is a lion” and ready for anything.

They’re doing high velocity overload, which involves eight to 11-second bursts of speed. Yip is obedient yet requires convincing of the value of every drill. Questioning is true learning and Massey says “I like the fact that she can challenge me. She’s not afraid to say, ‘why are we doing this’?”

World records are no longer Yip’s pursuit, winning is. Ageing athletes can’t necessarily go faster, but learn to bring their polished best to a given race. Right now, in a life dictated by numbers, three events consume her. The world championships in late September. Her marriage in early October to pilot Bruce Boo. And mid-August in 2028 when the Los Angeles Paralympics will be held.

The last is a long, hard, distant road but this is a competitor of rare pluck who is driven by the simplest of things. Towards the end of filming, as the camera crew prepare for another take, this writer suggests she hang onto the side of the pool and take a break.

She grins.

“It’s OK. I love swimming.”

And off she goes, stroking slowly, giving herself to the silent embrace of the water that saved her.