Athletes push their limits at the inter-school biathlon

Story by Lee Hwee Cheng. Pictures by Leslie Tan

East Coast Park, Saturday, April 21, 2007 — The Red Sports Crew decided to work overtime on the weekend at the Inter-Collegiate and Schools Biathlon Challenge last week.  For once, we had the chance to tog out in shorts and flip-flops for work,  catch a tan ourselves at the beach with the lithe-limbed, brown-skinned biathletes some of whom were as young as seven-years-old.  We also had the enthusiastic company of Victoria Cambell, Singapore’s fastest woman triathlete, who gladly gave us her precious Saturday afternoon to grace our first-ever RedSportsTV episode with a guest athlete (Ed: Coming up soon! Watch out for it on this space!).  Suddenly, "working overtime" didn’t sound as bad as it is usually made out to be.

We got down to East Coast Park, all lively and excited to be greeted by a motley crowd of fussing parents running around with video cameras in hand, frenzied little kids being ushered around by equally, if not more, frenzied adults, unruffled older kids lounging around with their MP3s in their pre-race mode, and the ever-stressed-out race officials dashing from station to station, shouting into their walkie-talkies.  The booming music over the speakers and the spontaneous chatter of Justin, the M.C. of the event, only set the whole affair abuzz, making it look more like a funfair than anything else.  The only things missing were a couple of hotdogs and some lemonade.

We got a little held up by the frantic search for precious parking space, but still we made it to the beach in time for the flag-off of the first races of the afternoon – the Junior ‘C’ Boys and Girls (Under-8), followed by the Junior ‘B’ Boys and Girls (Under-10).  The Red Crew, with our own video-camera in hand, had to squeeze through the crowd to the front to get a good view of the kids lined up at the starting line; somehow we seemed to blend in with the throngs of mothers beaming with pride and shoving their cameras towards the kids, except that none of those kids belonged to us.  Looking at the nervous and worried faces of those participants barely half our heights, we wondered what they might be thinking as they faced the choppy waters ahead.  A 200m-swim and 1km-run race would probably sound daunting to me as well, if I were a seven-year-old.

Next to be flagged off were the Junior ‘A’ Boys and Girls (Under-12) whose race consisted of a 200m-swim and a 2km-run.  The transition stage for the Junior races was probably that part of the afternoon that delighted the Red Sports Crew the most.  Kids who zig-zagged out of the water as they made their way along the red carpet to the transition area.  Kids who looked like they were still in a daze as they looked all around for their shoes.  Kids who looked like they were about to cry as they got lost amidst the hundreds of instructions coming in from beyond the barricades.  Kids who sat down and wore their socks and tied their laces like they were on their leisure way to school.  One smart kid brought along a tiny foldable stool. 

Next up were the Senior ‘C’ Boys and Girls (Under-14) and the Senior ‘B’ Boys and Girls (Under-16) waves, followed by the Junior College ‘A’ Boys and Girls (Under-18) and the Tertiary Men and Women divisions, all of whom had to tackle a 800m-swim and a 5km-run route.  Many of these participants, as we found out from Vicky our guest athlete, were already race-veterans in their own right, having had open-category experience in major local or international triathlons.  That very last statement does sound very impressive on a fifteen-year-old’s sporting resume, doesn’t it?

These well-trained and experienced participants, some of whom are in fact National Youth Triathletes, probably wanted to gain more open-sea experience and to better their individual race timings.  But more importantly, they brought along their schoolmates, some of whom would otherwise never have had the impetus to participate in a biathlon.  We bumped into Team NYP, who divulged that they were just a bunch of friends who played different sports in school but came together for the first time as a team to participate in their first biathlon race.  We like that attitude, and that spirit.  Way to go, dudes!

The Red Sports Crew have never seen a busier prize-giving ceremony at any other biathlon or triathlon event than we did that afternoon:  little boys and girls, some still in their tiny tri-suits, standing on the podium, raising their trophies high up in the air, as Mommy and Daddy started snapping away at their cameras.

Congratulations to all the winners of the day, and the Red Sports Crew look forward to seeing you again next year!

Full results and photos next page