Meet Singapore kitefoiler Max Maeder, the polite champion who despises losing

He’s only 17, can give you directions in five languages, is a kite-foiling world champion twice over, has been compared to Max Verstappen by a rival, squats 160kg, has better manners than a deacon, competes as if he’s a robot and oh, yes, there’s one more small thing you should know.

Maybe it’s best if you don’t play Max Maeder in chess.

Not because Max, for all his logical brain, is some budding grandmaster; it’s because competitiveness runs through him like an electric charge. If it’s anything, even a game of air hockey, this son of a Singaporean mother, Hwee Keng, and Swiss father, Valentin, naturally and very politely heats up.

“Immediately,” he says, “it becomes a match.”

“I think naturally, in anything I do, I must feel the urge to have done it that little bit better.”

The actor Will Smith once noted that basketballer Michael Jordan would compete in trying to drink a glass of water faster than anyone. Max isn’t this intense about everything, but please don’t underestimate him. Don’t get distracted by his courtesy. Don’t think he reached the podium of his last 25-30 events by being some reluctant, blushing competitor.

Some athletes hate losing, even more than they like winning, and I put this to him. Being Max he considers the question gravely, as if to be frivolous is disrespectful, and only then replies.

“It is important to me that I come and give my best consistently. There is a condition attached to it. That it should be better than my best that I gave last time. And while winning is fine, I absolutely despise losing.”

I asked Max to further explain, for the athlete’s brain is so uniquely wired it belongs almost to some alien species. His explanation, divorced of all conceit, is a tutorial in an elite performer’s mentality.

“You have the capability, as do others, to prove yourself as the best athlete or the fastest at the moment. And as challenging as it may be, the potential lies there and it’s up to you to realise it.” And so – to translate what he means – if you don’t win, you haven’t made it happen, you haven’t seized what you feel should belong to you. “Losing something is a much stronger emotion naturally than winning something.”

We need to understand Max because he’s at a place no Singapore athlete has ever been to. Not even Joseph Schooling. He is the favourite for his event at the Olympics. This isn’t to put pressure, this is to state a fact.

This is also, irrespective of what occurs in Paris, a chance to celebrate a teenager with a CV unmatched in this nation. He won the Asian Games title in 2023, not to mention every event he entered in 2024 including

the Formula Kite Open European Championships

and the World Championships. He is an ambling, modest, big-smiling leader of a developing craft.

So what is he made of?

Wires and levers? Blood and tissue?

Maybe a bit of both.

“I lean on the side of the more collected and calculated,” he says. “I would like to picture myself as very controlled and procedure-oriented like a pilot or an astronaut. Just executing what I need to execute.”

Max uses his hands animatedly as he speaks but wears his emotions tidily, without any outward excess. Asked if he ever cries when he loses and his answer is extraordinary.

“No, not even close. There’s no reason for me to cry, the life I lead is an absolute privilege.” But defeat stays with him, like an ache under his skin, an uneasy “restlessness” he can’t shake “for a long period of time where I find it very difficult to forget or be happy or just move on”.

If the exterior of Max is genial, the interior is armoured. He trusts in his skills, his data, but also in his fire. Competition is his spark, it sets him quietly aflame.

You sense he likes the interrogation of his workplace, of being attached to a kite, moving at 80kmh on his fastest days, skimming over the water like a human stone, forced to make split-second decisions even while his heart is drumming at 200 beats per minute. It’s as if he’s living the words of the essayist Henry David Thoreau: “All good things are wild and free.”

Max’s fire – and you can’t win so much without it – is not always evident. Maybe because he’s out there, on the water, and we can’t see it. Maybe because he never boasts or postures. His fire is more an insistence, like a mountaineer whose breath turns ragged in the thin air, the wind lacing into him like a whip, but still he walks on.

So how driven Max is, and how strongly his instinct to compete flares, is revealed only when he tells you stories. And sometimes – and this points to his honesty – it’s about mistakes he made.

In an event in Majorca in March 2024, right from the start he began duelling with fellow competitor Tony Vodisek. This is pure, unadulterated Max, whose nostrils twitch at the idea of a dogfight. “My entire focus,” he explains, “narrowed down to trying to best him in a fleet of let’s say around 30 people.”

But he was so absorbed by Vodisek he didn’t look behind during a turn, didn’t factor in the other rider behind him till it was too late and crashed. “It’s like not turning the blinkers on before you turn. And then the car rams into you from behind.”

“The point I’m trying to make is I have a very natural tendency to get narrowed down into dogfights, just really focus on going one-on-one with this opponent, when you could have a much broader overview of the entire situation and make more rational decisions.”

He lost that race. He corrected his flaw. He won the event.

His Olympic event will be held in Marseilles and to this oldest of French cities comes a composed young Singaporean. That his sport involves the word “kite” is somehow appropriate for it is, after all, not just an object, sometimes 23m square, that is flown in the wind.

It also means a graceful bird of prey.