After long wait for victory, bowler Ng offers a tearful lesson: Keep the faith

Talent is only an opinion till winning establishes it as fact. Every week of every year athletes are engaged in this giving of proof. And yet there's never enough of it. You win and people say great but what's next? So you sip some champagne and return to the ascetic life. You're a headline for a day, then you're like everyone else. Chasing silver.

- Rohit Brijnath

It never gets easier. The next win just won't come and doubt arrives like a bully. You flinch at struggling form and watch your birthdays pass. Your head is a small room of competing voices asking uncomfortable questions. Too old? Am I done? What the %$#?

And so what happens when you eventually, brilliantly find the right answers. You do what Shayna Ng, the 35-year-old bowler, does on May 10. You kind of sweetly, briefly, fall apart.

Ng has a feline named Truffles and a resolve that's stern. She may be sentimental about her cat (she has 200 videos of it on her phone) but crying in sport isn't usually her thing. But in Topeka, Kansas, it's just all too much and she's drying her eyes with her shirt. In Topeka, she wins an individual pro bowling tour event after six years. Relief arrives like water from a ruptured dam.

"I kind of broke down a little bit," she says the next day from Las Vegas. "I did not cry at all from the first two (tour events) that I won (in 2018 and 2019). The emotions just hit me and then I just started tearing. There were a lot of pent-up things. And secondly, because my teammates (New Hui Fen and Bernice Lim) really helped me."