SINGAPORE – When she came to Singapore in 2002, Tao Li did not plan to enrol in the Singapore Sports School (SSP).

Her mum made the decision for her and looking back, the former national swimmer calls her time at its Woodlands campus “one of the best chapters” in her career.

The 34-year-old Wuhan native said: “I came from China and back then, my mum had to work and didn’t have the time to take care of me, so the Sports School was her best choice.

“I could train there, the gym is upstairs, pool downstairs and my mum didn’t have to travel up and down to fetch me, basically everything in one.”

Describing the school as a “benefactor”, Tao Li, who won two Asian Games golds and 30 titles at the SEA Games, said it gave her the opportunity to be flexible with her studies and training schedules.

“If not for the Sports School, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” added the first Singaporean swimmer to qualify for an Olympic final, finishing fifth in the 100m butterfly at the 2008 Beijing Games.

And as the SSP celebrates its 20th anniversary in April, The Straits Times looks at how the school has impacted Singapore’s sporting landscape, its highs and lows, and whether it has achieved the mission outlined in 2004 when it opened its doors.

Former student-athletes, sports administrators and officials that ST spoke to feel that SSP has largely fulfilled its mission, which the school says is to “nurture aspiring national athletes into learned champions with character, champions in sport, for sports, and in life”.

While some say it has been a boon for the sports community, there are critics who feel that it is a work in progress as the school has not achieved all its goals.

A first for S’pore sport

In 2000, then Minister for Community Development and Sports Abdullah Tarmugi proposed the idea of a sports school to bolster the nation’s development in sports. Approval was granted a year later and the SSP opened its doors to much fanfare in 2004.

The school’s intake then was focused on eight sports – athletics, badminton, bowling, football, netball, sailing, swimming and table tennis. That has since expanded to include fencing, shooting and other sports.

SSP Alumni Association president Janice Yun said: “In the community there were a lot of questions about the role that the SSP plays, they had to prove that it was the educational institute for budding athletes to join and had to make sure that they dominated at the local games like the National School Games (NSG), in key sports at least.

“The next question would be: Was SSP’s sole purpose just to prove to Singaporeans that having such a model was feasible for students?”

Its early days was also marked by some unhappiness from other schools which complained that SSP’s inclusion in the NSG was unfair as the latter recruited the best student-athletes and had the best resources. It also had to compete with elite secondary schools for sports talent.

A different tack

Like its counterparts in Qatar and Malaysia, the SSP was set up to give student-athletes the flexibility to choose a curriculum that suited their sporting pursuits.

For example, if a student-athlete needs to take three months off classes for a competition, the school will provide make-up lessons when they return. Over the years, it has also collaborated with polytechnics to offer customised diploma programmes and in 2014 launched the International Baccalaureate diploma programme to offer a longer development runway and greater flexibility for student-athletes to pursue studies and sports.

The School-Within-A-School programme with the Singapore Badminton Association and Singapore Table Tennis Association also provides optimised training and customised academic support for students.

In recent years, SSP has worked with several tertiary institutions to accommodate national carded athletes and their study schedules. They get priority bidding for modules and university staff monitor their schedules to help them optimise their training times.

Tao Li believes that the flexibility and attention gave her and her schoolmates the opportunity to go further in their sporting careers.

She said: “If let’s say the Olympic Games come in, I could stop school for three months and focus on my swimming, that’s why they could produce so many world champions.”

Agreeing, former national bowler Jazreel Tan, who retired in January, said: “It’s just different, when day in and out you’re just surrounded by people with the same goals, the same ethics, be it in school or in sports. With the way the school is being run, the training sessions and the supervised study time helped me even when I was overseas. And after I come back, there are remedial lessons for me to catch up on my work.”

Boost for sport

The SSP has contributed to the pathway development and high performance in many sports, said Singapore Aquatics president Mark Chay.

He added: “They’ve worked very closely with the national sports associations... There are many pathway development programmes within the Sports School, like bowling where they produce world champions, badminton, table tennis, and swimming as well.

“We owe a large number of our Asian Games medals to them, most notably from Tao Li, and at the SEA Games level, we have many who have stepped on the podium and seen our national flag fly high.”

Lim Teck Yin, who was Sport Singapore’s chief executive from 2011 to 2023, said: “They have created flexible pathways for student athletes to pursue their aspirations in high performance sport, the various education options that have been expanded over time, from offering O levels to including the IB programme.

“The development of the National Youth Sports Institute showed that they were able to adapt to evolving circumstances where the support for youth sport was enlarged beyond the school’s direct intake. And I think we would expect more good news in the years to come with respect to how they are developing and evolving to meet very diverse needs.”

Still striving for success

Over the last two decades, the SSP has produced 15 Olympians and 17 world champions in multiple sports.

Several SSP alumni who have competed at the Olympic Games include Tao Li, sprinter Shanti Pereira and fencer Amita Berthier, with all three winning honours at the Asian Games.

Over the years, it has seen more student-athletes making the step up to compete at the Asian level. At the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, there were 38 past and present students who competed and that shot up to 43 in Jakarta in 2018 and 65 in the delayed Hangzhou edition in 2023.

Notable world champions include badminton player Loh Kean Yew, wushu exponent Jowen Lim and bowler Darren Ong.

SSP principal Ong Kim Soon said: “It was set up in order to support aspiring national athletes so that as they pursue their high performance sports, education doesn’t have to be compromised.”

Noting that the school has fulfilled its mission, he added: “Certainly, if you look back, 15 Olympians and 17 world champions should be a testimony of how the support has produced these outcomes.”

A closer look in the archives however, paints a slightly different picture.

Ahead of its opening 20 years ago, media reports said that the ultimate aim of the school was to nurture future champions to help Singapore become a top-10 sporting nation in Asia by 2010, as recommended by the Committee on Sporting Singapore in 2004.

SSP’s former principal, the late Moo Soon Chong, said in 2002: “Our aim is not to win the inter-school competitions. We are aiming higher than that. Our goal is to produce future medallists at the Asian Games and the Olympics.”

At the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, Singapore finished 16th on the medal table with four gold, seven silver and six bronze medals. Among the top 10 nations that year were South-east Asian neighbours Thailand and Malaysia with their medal hauls of 11-9-32 and 9-18-14 respectively.

Since then, Team Singapore have placed 15th, 18th and 20th in subsequent editions of the Games in 2014, 2018 and 2023.

Singapore’s five Olympic medallists, including 100m butterfly champion Joseph Schooling, are not graduates of the SSP.

Lim said: “The high performance sports system is always going to be a work in progress... its ability to be able to generate champions must lie in how an actual narrative is formed around youth and parental commitment towards high performance sport.”

Noting that Olympic success can take three or four Olympic cycles, he added that the Sports School is an “easy entry point” for parents and students, and that “it’s only a matter of time before we do see SSP alumni achieving Olympic success”.

Only a passing grade

One of the critics of the SSP is former Singapore National Olympic Council vice-president Low Teo Ping, who graded the school five out of 10.

Noting that they have produced multiple Olympians, Low has set a higher bar and feels that the school should be producing medals at that level.

“The comparison of going to the Olympics versus winning something at the Olympics, none of them have won anything,” he said. “Not that we expect winning a medal at the Olympics to be easy.”

The former Singapore Sailing Federation president also highlighted that the school has not produced much in terms of team sports – the school’s academies include football and netball.

While graduates of its football academy include Lions Irfan and Ikhsan Fandi among others, Singapore’s Under-22, U-23 and senior teams have not achieved any success in the past decade in the Asean Championship, SEA Games or Asian Games.

Chay added that with the facilities at its disposal, the SSP can do more to promote team sports.

He said: “Other schools outside may not have the facilities or resources to build teams and SSP can consider to take some of the talent there and develop team sports because I would say we are doing poorly in team sports.”

While there have been many highs in its history, the school also hit a low in October 2023 when a Secondary 2 student from SSP’s badminton academy, Pranav Madhaik, 14, died after a 400m fitness time trial.

Calling it “one of the worst things that happened” in the last 20 years, Ong added: “It was certainly a very unfortunate incident, nobody wanted it to happen and therefore we were very thorough in our investigation and our preventive measures were scrutinised.”

Since the incident, an expert panel has been formed by SSP in consultation with the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY) to help review the school’s safety policies and protocols.

The way forward

While the school has made strides in improving the integration between academia and sports, recruiting the best talent remains a challenge.

Chay said: “They face a lot of competition from some schools that are actually developing their own sports-centric curriculums. There’s constant struggle and competition for talent.”

Yun also urged the school to look beyond traditional sports like athletics, football and badminton, and to “keep a lookout for emerging sports” like e-sports, for example.

Ong accepts that although they want the best talent, the decision does not lie with them.

He said: “If they rather go to another popular school such that they enjoy the prestige of being in a popular school, the final decision should go back to the child.”

And it is a decision that Tan, who won multiple SEA and Asian Games medals and a Masters silver at the World Women’s Championship in 2007, does not regret.

The 34-year-old said: “Everybody has their own choices, but for me going to the Sports School was one of the best decisions of my life.”