For Max, 2024 is the past — he's just focused on the present

Yesterday in sport is history. Yesterday might have been brilliant but it's over. Yesterday was full of handshakes, well-dones, podiums and celebrations yet a calendar turns and a new year starts always with zero wins.

- Rohit Brijnath

Now what?

Sport is a relentless interrogator, it doesn't care who you are or what you won, it merely asks impertinently difficult questions. Sometimes successful athletes say in frustration, "I have nothing to prove", but sport demands it of every competitor till they hang up their boots, racket or kitefoil.

Michael Phelps won eight Olympic golds in 2008, but in 2009 he started again, on the same blocks as everyone else. What is greatness we wonder? In a single hefty word, consistency.

And so the past is celebrated, analysed, learnt from and then put aside. Like a young man's Olympic medal which lies now in a friend's house in Singapore. Max Maeder doesn't need to see it any more. That was yesterday. He's interested only in today.

Maeder is the 2024 Straits Times Athlete of the Year, presented by 100Plus, and he wears this honour politely but his attention is reserved only for 2025. Yesterday can be a sentimental journey, but today is a practical place of weights lifted, hard practice, winds read, technology studied. Sport never gets easier, that's its only promise.