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SEA Games 2025: Behind the scenes – fears, tears, and the rawness of sport
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Team Singapore softballers feeling despondent after losing 3-0 to Philippines in the men's team final at the SEA Games.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
- Calvin Quek's emotional reaction in the mixed zone after winning Singapore's first SEA Games 400m hurdles gold in 60 years highlighted the raw emotions athletes experience.
- The "mixed zone" across various SEA Games venues provides athletes with an outlet to express relief, frustration, and joy, humanising them beyond their performance.
- Singaporean athletes consistently engaged with the media in the mixed zone, sharing their experiences regardless of results, thus underscoring the significance of sportsmanship.
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BANGKOK – What does a Games smell and feel like?
At the Supachalasai National Stadium, hurdler Calvin Quek has just crossed the line to clinch Singapore’s first gold
He stumbles into the media mixed zone, the area where every athlete, winner or loser, passes, separated from the waiting press only by a row of barricades.
In this zone, Quek’s sweat and tears sum up the rawness that is sport.
Hunched over, spent from this gruelling one-lap race with 10 hurdles, he asks for water, sits down, back against the wall.
Malaysia’s Muhammad Aiman Najmi, who finished fifth, is sprawled out beside him, equally exhausted.
Quek stands to speak, but before he can talk he bursts into tears. Finally, the magnitude of what he has achieved hits him.
Calvin Quek sits in disbelief on the floor at the mixed zone just ahead of speaking to the media
ST PHOTO: DEEPANRAJ GANESAN
Welcome to the mixed zone, the emotional hub of the SEA Games.
This zone has many forms.
Sometimes it is in an air-conditioned room, like at the badminton venue in the Thammasat University Gymnasium. Other times it is in full view of spectators like at the Huamark Aquatic Centre, where swimmers laugh, or weep, as they dissect their triumphs and failures.
At the Fashion Island Shopping Mall’s Island Hall, where fencers clash on the piste, it happens in the athletes’ warm-up area, where sounds and smells mingle in the pungent odour of sweat-drenched shirts drying on metal barricades.
As they say in Thailand, the mixed zone is “same same, but different”.
It is where sport sheds its armour. It is where athletes tell their stories – tales of pain, injuries, 4am wake-up calls, weddings and funerals missed, of hard grit and toil on the mat, in the pool, on the track.
At the Supachalasai stadium’s mixed zone, Quek tells the story of a man burdened by his own and others’ expectations, who finally finds joy, and relief, when he wins gold.
At the Fashion Island mall, fencer Amita Berthier struggles to hold back tears, as she describes the impact of her siblings’ presence
The mask comes off in the mixed zone, for swimming sisters Quah Ting Wen and Jing Wen
Singapore’s Aacus Ee breaks down in tears after losing in the men’s ne-waza 85kg final.
PHOTO: BERITA HARIAN
The Singapore men’s softball team, eyes red and leaking, hearts broken after losing their gold to the Philippines
The mixed zone is not always a pretty one, but in those brief moments I am reminded of my privilege. To be there in the zone, to give voice to what happens behind the scoreboard, beyond the smiles on the podium.
This is why I admire our local athletes.
Throughout these Games, my media colleagues and I have not encountered anyone who turned down an interview request at the mixed zone.
Unlike at the Olympics or Asian Games, where mixed zones are mapped out such that athletes must pass through them on the way out, it is not the case at the SEA Games.
Yet win or lose, Team Singapore’s athletes show up, talk, laugh and pour their hearts out.
They remind us that sport is more than just a shiny medal.
