A sister readies to compete even as she mourns brother

In a quiet room at the Sports Hub, her guide dog Orinda lying across her feet, a young athlete weeps as she speaks. Her sentences are swollen with grief yet full of tenderness and punctuated by occasional smiles of fond remembrance.

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Sophie Soon, 28, the swimmer who has a visual impairment, is talking about her brother, Colin, a five-time gold medallist at the Asean Para Games who died earlier in 2025 at 19. Her pain, like anyone who suffers great loss, is ineffable and immeasurable.

People speak of closure but it's too neat a word for something so complex. Grief has no finality, it never fully evaporates but settles into the crevices of the being. It carries through a life and sometimes into a pool.

Sophie, a 100m breaststroke silver medallist at the 2022 World Para Swimming Championships, now competes in that same championships in Singapore in September 2025. Just showing up to compete has required this sister’s bravery.

"When I was grieving very deeply about Colin," she says, "there was so much pain, and I really didn’t know if I was ever going to get through it, if I was ever going to swim again. For a period of time, I might have been preparing my team that we may need to pull out of the worlds because I didn’t even know if I wanted to do it any more.”