WALAA- MAAU-SSSC Track & Field Meet

It's good to finally have a pocket of time to blog... In fact, I was using this pocket to clear up my things and came across some old artefacts belonging to a bygone era in my life. Since they related to a recent trip I made to Malaysia, I thought I may as well take some pictures of them.

A few posts down, but quite a while ago now, I wrote about an escape to Malaysia to sort my thoughts out, remember? Well, it so happened that the trip coincided with the Bersih and Perkasa rallies, resulting in KL going into lockdown and I being shunted to Cititel Hotel in Mid-Valley.

While milling around in the lobby, I saw some girls wearing tracksuits bearing the word 'Singapore' on them and so asked them what they were doing in Malaysia.

"Oh we are here for a Track and Field meet. It's a junior meet for Under 15s. It's at Bukit Jalil. Why don't you come and watch us?" said the most chatty of the girls as she flashed me a disarming smile. "It's am international competition between Singapore, Malaysia and --"

"Australia", I said, finishing her sentence.

"How did you know?" she asked.

"I ran in this same competition in 1991", I explained.

"B-but, I wasn't even born then!" she said, and looking embarassed, promptly erased her smile and terminated the conversation.

Notwithstanding that she probably felt I was 9 parts dinosaur, and possibly 1 part pedophile, I thought there was no harm heading down to Bukit Jalil, since I could not get into KL anyway...

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It has been more than 15 years but I realised that the smell of Deep Heat and other muscle ointments which helped in race preparation still managed to set me on edge and fill me with the nervous anticipation of yet another race.

Sigh... That used to be me...





A pleasant surprise was that I managed to chat with someone I had not seen for more than 15 years. This is Patrick Zehnder, one of the legendary coaches of Singapore track and field, and to date, the only one who has coached a Singaporean Asian Games Gold Medallist (400m in the 1974 Games in Tehran. Her 400m and 800m records still stand to this day!). He was also a classmate of my father's more than 60 years ago at St. Joseph's Institution.



This is me with some of the Singapore athletes. There were a whole load of them but all the girls ran away, leaving only the guys to take a picture with me (Why? Is there a sinister look about me?)



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But back to those items I found which caused me to write this article (and to reminisce a tad too much)...

I was clearing my cupboard when I found an overloaded black bag which weighed quite a lot. I opened it and found all my track and field stuff - spikes, track suits, running gear and medals. I almost cried.

Specifically, these are my tangible memories of my time representing Singapore a long, long time ago...





All right, enough of thinking about the past and back to my life in the present. With a little bit of effort, I may yet make something of it