SEA Games swimming: Tao Li, Joseph Schooling deliver gold rush for Singapore

REPORTING FROM MYANMAR

Tao Li and Joseph Schooling are “exceptional athletes”, said Singapore swimming head coach Ian Turner, at the close of a bountiful evening for country at the 2013 Southeast Asian Games.

It was difficult to argue with the Brit – especially after the duo contributed to the lion’s share of a dominant four-gold, two-silver showing by Singapore at the Wunna Theikdi arena in Myanmar.

Tao scooped up two golds in the 100m backstroke and butterfly events, which were scheduled to start just 20 minutes apart.

That was exactly the reason why she badly wanted to win those two events, said the 23-year-old, because she knew it would be tough with scant time to rest in between.

Both of Tao’s wins were by less than one second margins, and she acknowledged afterwards that her timings were “not very good”.

“I wanted to break my records,” she told reporters in Mandarin. “But I held back in view of the two, nearly back-to-back events.”

Tao’s teammate Quah Ting Wen, 21, finished just 0.4s behind her in the butterfly while the younger Quah, Zheng Wen, also settled for silver in the men’s 100m backstroke despite breaking his own national record with a 56.11s swim.

Milestone men

There were more landmarks set by Singapore’s male swimmers that day, beginning with Joseph Schooling propelling to victory in the 100m butterfly with a meet record time of 52.67s.

This despite trailing runner-up Triady Fauzi Sidiq of Indonesia for half the race, after a poor plunge left him in last position when the swimmers surfaced, said Schooling.

But after the turn he “held it together”, eventually overtook Sidiq, and once he knew he was guaranteed champion, Schooling could afford to let his “foot off the gas” to conserve energy for the 4x100m freestyle relay just minutes away.

The 18-year-old later anchored his team of Clement Lim, Danny Yeo and Darren Lim to another Games record-breaking feat that defeated silver-medalists Malaysia by five seconds.

It’s “down the home stretch now”, said Schooling, as he prepares for two more events to reach his personal target of six gold medals at the Games.

And going by the four meet records he has smashed in the last three days alone, one would be hard-pressed to bet against Singapore’s prince of the pool achieving exactly what he set out to do.

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