After Olympic heartbreak, Singaporean swimmer Chantal Liew turns pain into inspiration

Straits Times

2 days ago

If you want a tale of heartbreak, don't go fumbling in the romance section of a bookshop. Just ask any athlete and they'll tell you. About chances missed, bad breaks, last-minute goals. About emptiness, tears, splintered dreams. About a pain which they can precisely measure for you.
In open water swimmer Chantal Liew's case, it's 1.7 seconds.
Ask and she'll autopsy her heartbreak for you, just take you back to late 2023 when her form was strong and then sickness hit in Portugal. 'Insane gastro' followed, nausea, inability to eat, waking up weeks later in 2024 for the Olympic qualifier in Doha with a sore throat, mentally accepting her Games dream was done.
Then the race began and it 'was the best I've ever swum internationally at the start of the race'. Miracle? Nope. The past, all the diarrhoea she'd had, how sick she'd been, returned to ruin her present. Her strength faded, her charge wilted. She and the Chinese swimmer Xin Xin were fighting for an Olympic place and as the finish line beckoned they both sprinted and after 10km and over two hours the clock told her this story.
Xin 2:04:21.10.
Liew 2:04:22.80.
Just half a stroke short of Paris 2024.
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Maybe defeat by 15 seconds would have been better because 1.7 seconds was so achingly close. Months later when the Opening Ceremony started in Paris, and she was watching with friends in Australia, she had to leave the room. Weeping, you understand.
But now it's 2025 and the world championships are in Singapore and she's repaired herself. In a demanding sport, there's no room to wallow in sadness. There's dirty water being drunk in choppy seas and a heart rate that has to be controlled as the heat rises, fatigue arrives and 'everyone's jumping on top of you'.
There's mid-race 'carbo drinks', handed to them via a modified fishing rod, occasionally with Panadol inside because everything's hurting. She swims with one arm and holds the drink with another, never stopping for anything, whether it's seaweed brushing against her in Budapest like ghostly tendrils or stinging jellyfish in Australia.
On decent days, at the last kilometre, there's 'delirium'. On tough days, 'the whole body just shuts down, everything is numb'. Anything can happen. Once, she says, 'one of the girls swam so far off course she swam into the shipping lane'. And so yes, 'it's so hard' this pursuit, which is why she wonders every day, and so sometimes do her friends, 'why do we have to choose the least rewarding sport?'
There are few fans on the oceans and fewer headlines. 'You get less attention, you get less funding'. But like judokas or fencers they're infected by a love of a game which is so personal and deep it's impossible to explain, love for a challenge, love for discovering who they are under pressure, love for the wonderful expanse of water in which they are transformed.
'We're all just a little bit unhinged,' laughs Liew, 'and at the end of the day we love the pain. It feels so satisfying and it feels so rewarding in such a specific way that nothing else comes close to that feeling.' She remembers training with Chelsea Gubecka in 2023 and doing seven race simulations but with a painful twist. Their race distance was 10km but they did 12km sessions. They were 'the hardest things ever' but when it was done 'we would just be so euphoric'.
Open water, an art both strategic and severe, involves skills 'you can only pick up from racing'. There are 'decisions you need to know how to make under pressure... like whether or not you want to get on this person's feet or the other person's feet? (Like drafting in cycling). Which line do you want to take? Where do you want to position yourself in the pack? How do you want to position yourself going into the turn?'
Her tone is rich with enthusiasm and it's a triumphant reversal from 2024 when disappointment encased her. 'It was really hard for me to get back into the water... Even when I was in the pool I didn't feel like swimming. I hated it. The only thing that kept replaying in my head was that 1.7 seconds.'
But this is the appeal of athletes, the way they acknowledge defeat, conquer distress, grow new skins and turn hurt into inspiration. And so now when she's tired at the end of a practice session, her coach Eugene Chia will use that 1.7 seconds as fuel.
'He's like '1.7 seconds, go, get it, 1.7 seconds, don't give up'. I think that 1.7 seconds, it's so painful, but it's reached a point where it kind of motivates me. It lights that fire where I don't want a repeat of that ever again.'
And so as Liew, and her open-water gang, ready for races which are 3km, 5km, 10km, one thought persists. We know precisely the distances they will swim, but never how immeasurably far they have come.