THE WATER WARRIOR

An unbending competitive spirit and hard work have resulted in a long, illustrious career for Paralympic swimmer Yip Pin Xiu.

- Rohit Brijnath Assistant Sports Editor

The swimmer slips smoothly off her wheelchair and onto the pool deck. Her coach helps tuck her hair in. A nose clip is attached. Paddles are tugged on. This place, the pool, is her factory, a place of unforgiving labour where she comes to design greatness. Her body has been long tested in competition and is racked by a nerve disease, but with religious repetition she keeps propelling it down a 50m highway of water.

It’s mid-March and Yip Pin Xiu, 33, and 17 years from her first Paralympic gold, is still grinding in the OCBC Aquatic Centre. Still accumulating metres (2,000 on most days). Still finding the energy to tease her coach.

“Can I go home?” she grins.

“No,” Mick Massey, an English man, scowls in jest.

He yells encouragement. Stopwatches measure decimals. Blood is taken mid-session and lactate is measured. Bungee cords are tied to her to provide resistance.

“She can do things,” says Massey, “that nobody else can.” Then he tells the story about her training camp in Sydney in 2024. It’s just before the Paris Paralympics, when the training’s been rough and she’s tired and they have a 12x50m set at hard pace the next day.

Massey decides to exchange it for a lighter set, but Yip won't budge. She’s insistent on finishing the hard set. “It was,” he remembers, “one of the special moments because she absolutely blitzed it. The times were season-best times.”

An athlete exhausted but committed. Later, she says, “I won't let somebody give me the excuse that, okay, you can rest today and do it tomorrow.”

It’s because her talent has shone so persistently that she became the youngest Nominated MP in Singapore, has a waxwork in Madame Tussauds, is told by 70-year-old ladies on the MRT how inspiring she is and has seven Paralympic gold medals and one silver.