A TALE OF MANY SPORTS

He has tasted setbacks both in the pool and out of it — a fact which makes him eminently qualified to speak about resilience in the face of difficulties. But water polo player Lim Yao Xiang is not a man of many words.

Yet that doesn’t change the script of his inspiring tale. As a promising national age group swimmer at Maris Stella High, he was poised for some breakthrough. Peaking at 16, he threatened some of the nation’s top breaststroke swimmers and was expected to go far.

But he went downhill from 17 and somehow could not make the transition from age group success to national glory. While he worked very hard to get into the SEA Games team and came close, he just didn’t make the cut eventually.

Looking back, the PE teacher at Raffles Institution says he went through a mental block. “After I entered junior college (JC), my times got worse. After a while, the battle wasn’t physical anymore. There was fear in my heart whenever I raced. The fear of failure was with me for years,” he recalls. And that was crippling.

Things picked up when he entered national service and he got back his rhythm. But he was not selected for the 2003 SEA Games in Hanoi, Vietnam. “That was a low point in my career. I had worked very hard to pick myself up and improved my times again after the disastrous JC years. I felt I did everything right. Yet my dream of donning national colours as a swimmer didn’t happen because others were better,” he says.

Undeterred, he shifted his focus to a sport which he, at that point, had not even heard of — fin swimming. With the sport featuring in the SEA Games in Hanoi that year, he went for the trials and surprised himself by making it to the Singapore team. There was more good news as he and his team mates actually beat everyone else in their race. With that, he, making his SEA Games debut, won a gold medal. It may not come from swimming, his first love, but it was still much treasured.

Then came the next chapter. With fin swimming’s status at the SEA Games in doubt, he had to look for another sport if he were to continue enjoying the feeling of winning. Enter Lim Yaoxiang the water polo player. In 2006, he started training seriously. He showed his potential quickly but, in another familiar twist, he just missed making it to the final squad for the 2007 SEA Games in Korat, Thailand.

But he chose to view the glass as half full. “That (close call) left me feeling very motivated. I was a beginner, yet I had come very close,” he says. From then, he, driven by pure passion, hardly skipped a training session despite the demands of school work at first the National University of Singapore and then the National Institute of Education.

In 2009, his hard work paid off when he was selected for the SEA Games in Vientiane, Laos, and won gold with his team. This was followed by two more golden outings at the SEA Games — in Palembang, Indonesia, in 2011 and in Naypyidaw, Maynmar, in 2013. “My story is very simple. It just says hard work and passion do pay off,” he says. Whether conquering the odds in sports or in other aspects of life (like in studies where he was once retained as a student at Anglo Chinese Junior College), what keeps him going are motivational quotes, including the one that says “Do not be the best but be the best you can be”. Coming from Yao Xiang, such sayings aren’t just clichés. He has already tested them out — in the pool and outside of it.