Joseph Schooling

On The Straits Times' new podcast series ST's Hard Tackle, former national swimmers David Lim and Tao Li, a two-time Asian Games champion who was also ...

To be honest, I don’t think that he will add some levels back to get to the Asian Games and win a gold. It’s hard and the environment needs to be one where everyone wants it, where everybody trains like you and push you. And when he came back to Singapore after the gold medal, there wasn’t that one person who took up that role, led him and guided him. Lim: Your stance will be different because the first time you win it, you approach it wanting to win it, but the second time, you want to protect it. And when you get to the Asian Games, you got the big boys like China, Japan and South Korea... and he needed to have proper guidance. And you don’t want to keep on putting in disappointing swims and performances and get flak. It is going to be very hard for him to get to the levels that he is used to... Tao Li: To be honest, life is not just about swimming for him and for everyone else, right? But right now, from what I read, getting time off to train is tough (for Schooling) and I can imagine that it is going to be doubly or triply hard for a full-time athlete to get back to the levels that they want to. It’s going to take a long time before an athlete from Singapore is going to win the gold medal at the Olympics and he did it in a sport where it is participated by 160 or 170 countries, instead of some obscure sport. So I tip my hat to him, he did very well and we are all so proud of him.