Jan 01
[Singapore, 01 January 2023]
Dear members of our aquatics family, A very Happy New Year to all of you.
Today marks the start of what will be an eventful year for the swimming fraternity. 2023 will be an unprecedented year where our athletes will take part in three major events: the Cambodia SEA Games in May, the World Championships in Fukuoka in July, followed by the Hangzhou Asian Games, scheduled for September. It will be a chance for our athletes to build on the breakthroughs they have made in 2022. In the past year, our swimmers, divers and water polo players have made great strides. At the 2022 SEA Games, Singapore once again showed our superiority in the pool, winning 21 golds, 11 silvers and 12 bronzes in Hanoi.
Our swimmers also made waves beyond regional waters, with Teong Tzen Wei clinching a Commonwealth Games silver and a historic fourth-place finish at the World Championships (25m).
In water polo, both our men’s and women’s teams captured the inaugural Water Polo Inter Nations Cup and cemented their dominance as the top sides in Asean. The men’s and women’s teams then followed that with sixth and fifth-place finishes respectively at the Asian Water Polo Championships.
In diving, Max Lee made history by finishing fourth at the World Junior Diving Championships and was the only Asian in the 12-diver final in Montreal, Canada. It was the highlight of the year in which diving also made great leaps in growing our stable of divers locally.
Our artistic and open water swimmers also did us proud with creditable performances at the Budapest World Aquatics Championships.
When our team took over the reins at the Singapore Swimming Association, our goal was to make sure aquatics maintains its position as the top sport in Singapore.
And I am glad to see that aquatics is indeed not only the top medal producer at major games, but is one of the rare sports in Singapore that can truly compete for a medal on the world stage.
We are in a privileged position. We are among the few sports to be able to galvanise the nation and I truly believe our sport can be a unifying force for good.
This coming together of the community to celebrate the sport is one of the reasons why we recently started the SSA Alumni (https://bit.ly/3gdFBJ8).
The alumni will allow us to better pay tribute to the icons who helped build our sport to where it is today. We also hope that the alumni can bring our aquatic family closer together by allowing athletes past and present to bond over shared experiences.
But we also want to go beyond just high-performance athletes. In 2023, we also hope to launch more learn-to-swim initiatives with partners and affiliates so as to reach out to the masses. We will not only be imparting life skills, but hopefully, also help more people fall in love with the sport and become lifelong fans.
We will also continue our initiatives to give back to the community, via initiatives such as the Safra Swim for Hope in which our athletes do their bit to raise funds for various beneficiaries, including the SSA.
SSA will be taking part in several fundraising initiatives this year - starting with the Water Polo Community Fund Raising event on January 7-8 at Our Tampines Hub. The goal is to raise $50,000 for water polo initiatives. I urge the fraternity to support these events as much as you can.
As we look forward to a busy 2023, it would be remiss of me not to pay tribute to the people who laid the foundation for my team.
I would like to thank the former SSA president Lee Kok Choy and his exco for the stellar work. His team brought our sport to new heights and we hope we can continue to keep the sport on an upward trajectory.
To all our affiliates, sponsors, partners, technical officials and volunteers, thank you for continuing to believe in our sport. You are the unseen hands in our athletes’ success and we are eternally grateful to have your onboard.
We have truly some exciting things lined up for the year and we will be sharing more initiatives throughout the year,
I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy and healthy 2023. My wish for the new year is that we can come closer as an aquatics family. Our sport and the achievements we hope to accomplish will be all the more sweeter knowing that we can bring our community closer.