We have the talent, our athletes can be great: Singapore Athletics chief Lien Choong Luen

Q: You have climbed Everest and embarked on several adventures, including being a United Nations peacekeeper. Of all the things you’ve done, which would you describe as the most challenging and why?

Lien Choong Luen: I’d say challenge comes in many different forms, in the same way that courage does. People talk about physical courage versus moral courage. Someone who can jump into a fire might find it difficult to stand up to authority, which requires moral, rather than physical courage.

Everest is physically challenging, but running my 800m race (at the 2016 Asian Masters Athletic Championships) was also challenging. Competing isn’t just about finishing a race; you’re talking about outcompeting other people who are training equally hard or even harder. The amount of time I had to put into that was as much as climbing an 8,000m mountain. And, competing is physically challenging because it is person versus person and you’re fighting against other people’s effort, not just against a static objective.

Organisationally, athletics is clearly very challenging. You’re dealing with a lot of people, a lot of emotions and many different interest angles. From a business perspective, ride-hailing is a mature, low-margin and highly competitive business which is a good thing for Singapore in general. But wow, the most challenging was the 800m.

Everyone can run two laps around the track, but if you’re racing two laps and trying to beat the next guy without knowing how fast he’s going to run, you better be training all hours. I was training at midnight after working super hard. The effort required for the 800m was very high. And as you get older, it gets more difficult. Recently, I went climbing again and that was tough because your body changes.

Q: How would you describe yourself? Are you someone who loves adrenaline and challenges? And how do you apply this side of yourself to your role as a national sports association (NSA) chief?

Lien: When I was younger, I was in the commandos and special forces – very hard-charging. The currency of leadership was then leading by example. I would jump on a concertina wire so 40 soldiers could run over my back. When you jump out of a plane, you jump out first. That was one form of leadership.

But as you get older, the real strength is being able to stay very calm. When you stay calm, you lower temperatures. Lowering temperatures allows everyone else to calm down so that the conversation becomes much more productive. The hardest conversations and the most difficult decisions happen when people are heated because they care a lot and the answer isn’t clear. That is when it is crucial to take a step back and maintain perspective.

Over time, I’ve transitioned from that hard-charging, military-style leadership to focusing on setting the right environment so that people can tackle the problem rather than tackling each other.

Q: Some have pointed to Singapore swimming’s rise from being a small fry in South-east Asia to the powerhouse it is today. Do you think athletics can do the same?

Lien: I have great belief in our athletes and I believe Singapore can do really well. We have Singaporeans who have succeeded in many things. Shanti (Pereira), Marc (Louis), Ang Chen Xiang, and Calvin Quek – our medallists have proved to us that our athletes can be great.

The emotional answer is: Of course we can. Man for man and woman for woman, we absolutely have the talent, the coaches and the dedication. However, the systems answer is: How many kids will actually take it up? What proportion of their time and co-curricular activity choices are channelled towards athletics? We face the same competition for talent that every sport and every job faces, and it’s only going to get more challenging.

Meanwhile, some of the other countries in the region are very large and are getting better resourced. So from that angle, the overall trends might be slightly more challenging for Singapore.

Q: Singapore enjoyed a golden era of athletics in the 60s and 70s – is recapturing that pure nostalgia? What will it take to get back to that level?

Lien: The blueprint for sports success is similar across many NSAs: Build a good pathway, establish foundational programmes to introduce kids to the sport, develop them well and sustain them through high performance. The challenge lies in the details.

In the old days, institutions like the police, prisons, SAFSA and Singapore Airlines were large organisations where sports served as a natural outlet. There were also companies involved in vibrant business house leagues. Nowadays, people have a lot more demands on their discretionary time.

We are starting a zone challenge in partnership with the President’s Challenge where we cluster three or four schools and help organise a track and field day for them. The goal is that promising student-athletes can then race under a zone flag at the national schools level. This is an opportunity to discover new talent. We have 130 to 140 secondary schools in Singapore; there’s no reason the lion’s share of talent should come only from the top three or four schools.

Singapore is incredibly well-resourced with stadiums and tracks. We should make the best use of it. We might be short on people, but we are not short on resources, and because we are small, coordination is easy. It would be a shame not to leverage those strengths.

Q: Other than Shanti Pereira, how hopeful are you that we will have other athletes hitting Asian-class levels?

Lien: It’s hard to make predictions because the field is incredibly tight. But if you look at our current roster, we have a great composition of youth and performance. Marc is young and doing well. Elizabeth-Ann Tan is young. Kerstin (Ong) is doing great. Ang and Calvin are already at the SEA Games gold medal standard, and I’d love to see them progress even further. We also have younger jumpers like Andrew George Medina. We’ve got a very good crop across many different disciplines and age levels.

Q: What will it take to get them to Shanti’s level?

Lien: What we would really love is to better support our athletes who want to go full time. Thiruben (Thana Rajan) is doing it full time; he was working with us at SA (Singapore Athletics) and is now committed to the sport. Kerstin and Keane Ko, who is in Slovenia. I’m super happy for them. For athletes who want to go full time, they bear the burden, the risk and the sacrifice. The least we can do is see how we can support them.

Q: Many NSAs struggle to find leaders. Are you currently on the hunt for a successor?

Lien: That is a hard question and definitely high on our minds. How do we get more people involved? We often tap on people who have a deep affinity for the sport; those who used to compete and love it. The simple answer is that it isn’t easy, but yes, we would love to find more leaders.

Anyone reading this, please come talk to us!

Athletics is in a good state, the work is very meaningful and we welcome you to join us.

Q: Six years on from being elected president, do you have any regrets about making that choice to step up?

Lien: It has been a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice. But the results that the team and the athletes have collectively demonstrated, and seeing the joy of the young kids and parents, that makes it very, very worthwhile. So, no regrets.

Q: What would you say has been your most fulfilling moment as president over these six years?

Lien: There have been many. Small moments, like older generations saying things are going well, are great. Medals and hearing the national anthem are always gratifying. But a uniquely special one was at the recent SEA Games. We’ve always been strong in sprints, but looking at the field, we had athletes in almost every discipline. While our girls were running the 10,000m, we simultaneously had a pole vaulter, a long jumper, a high jumper and a discus thrower out there competing.

Just seeing our field athletes being competitive on that stage was incredibly fulfilling, especially knowing where we came from.

Q: What’s the toughest conversation you’ve had with an athlete?

Lien: It’s always when you have to explain why they weren’t chosen, or when we have made an administrative mistake that caused them to miss out on something. It is very difficult, but you have to own it, apologise and make absolutely sure that the mistake is never made again.

Q: You met with Singapore National Olympic Council secretary-general Mark Chay after he made his remarks about athletics needing to “come to the party” and win more medals at the SEA Games. Was there a discussion around additional support for athletics?

Lien: Yes, we talked about it. I took his comments as productive. We have earned the right to have more asked of us; if we were ignored or if he didn’t mention us, it would be an indictment of our lack of results.

We discussed how we can work together to secure more funding. Now that athletes see hope and are willing to go full time, my job is to secure more funds, more trust from donors and buy-in from institutions like Sport Singapore to fund them.

Q: In response to Chay’s comment, distance runner Soh Rui Yong recently used the phrase “don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”, noting that local athletes lack adequate funding and support but compete against full-time ones from other nations. Is it fair to demand more golds from athletes without providing the pathways that others have?

Lien: The tone of his message could probably have been different, but the substantive content behind it is not wrong. It is very tough in the Singapore context. Athletes have a choice. Our top athletes are also top human capital talent. If they weren’t competing, they could be top bankers or lawyers. It is difficult to compete in an increasingly professional world. In the old days, many people worked and they competed, but your neighbours were also doing the same. Now, our neighbours are mostly full time. In that setting, we have to commit fully as well.

I tell my younger athletes: Working careers are getting longer, but your lifespan as a professional athlete is short. Give me three, four, or five years to commit fully to being an athlete. Take that chance, not just for athletics, but for yourself, so you don’t look back and wonder what you could have accomplished.

You can still be at the top of your professional career later; many people have demonstrated that.

Q: For people to go full time, they need more funding from SA. How do you plan to achieve that?

Lien: Over the past few years, through our recent successes, we’ve managed to bring on big sponsors like DBS and NTUC Income. We are looking for more strategic partners to support us. When a young boy or girl sees someone like themselves becoming a gold medallist at the Asian Games, like Shanti did, they have a concrete picture of who they can aspire to be. That is incredibly powerful. We want partners to help us support top athletes to inspire the young, as well as help fund grassroots kids’ athletics programmes.

Q: If Chay called you tomorrow and asked, ‘why does SA deserve more funding compared to others?’, what would you say?

Lien: If you want to be metric-focused about it, look at the Olympics. A third of the programming is swimming, a third is track and field, and a third is everything else. There are over 140 medals at stake in track and field.

We have an immense absorptive capacity; we can theoretically send over 100 athletes to major Games across various disciplines. Furthermore, it’s a broad church. If you are big, you can throw. If you’re lanky, you jump. It accepts all body types. Lastly, it is foundational and primal. Every kid has run, jumped or thrown. The barriers to entry are incredibly low and there’s no reason we cannot harness that potential much more effectively.

Q: The 2029 SEA Games will be on home turf. What would the target be?

Lien: On home soil, there is no reason we shouldn’t have two athletes representing us in every single event. Currently, I still need more throwers, walkers and multidisciplinary athletes. These are gruelling, sometimes lonely events that take immense dedication. My open call is this: If you are up for the challenge, we want to support you.