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Sporting Life
Jonathan Tan’s lesson to us: Strength of will counts more than size
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Singapore's Jonathan Tan (left) after winning the 100m freestyle gold at the SEA Games with bronze medallist Vietnam's Jeremie Loic Ninio Luong.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Too little, they told him as a kid. Too skinny, they insisted. Too undersized, they claimed, for a bruising game like ice hockey. Too much, they talked. What he did with the game eventually was so profound that Wayne Gretzky’s nickname said it all. The Great One. Not too bad for a small one.
Too small is what Jonathan Tan, who wears a choir boy’s smile, looks like on Sunday evening. Swimming sprinters can resemble beasts from another time. Florent Manaudou, the 50m freestyle champion at the 2012 Olympics, looked like he bench-pressed refrigerators and then emptied them. In the Olympic 50m freestyle final in 2021,
