Siobhan Haughey reveals her light bulb moment as she passes on swimming insights to Hong Kong’s next generation
- Haughey gives demonstration in the pool to local youngsters at Swim to Dream event and discusses her decorated career
- She reflects on her journey from ‘random girl’ to star, helped by a breakthrough realisation at the Tokyo Olympics
Sitting in the call room ahead of her 200 metres freestyle final at the Tokyo Olympics, Siobhan Haughey looked at the swimmers assembled around her and had something of an epiphany.
The Hong Kong star was moments away from winning a silver medal, but it was not until then, sitting next to the likes of Ariarne Titmus and Katie Ledecky, that she realised she belonged.
Haughey won the city’s first medal of any colour in the pool at an Olympics that day in Japan, and added a second in the 100m freestyle, cementing her place among the best athletes Hong Kong has ever produced.
Since then, she has set world records, dominated World Cup events, made more history in winning Hong Kong’s first swimming gold at the Asian Games and will carry its hopes, its expectations, and quite possibly its flag, in Paris this summer.
That is a lot for the 26-year-old to have sitting on her shoulders, and Haughey admitted thinking about whether that made her third Olympics harder than those in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo.
“I don’t know, but I feel like on one hand, I think people might have a lot of expectations on how I should perform,” she said. “But I feel like now that I have two Olympics behind me, and I have more confidence and more experience than before, I just want to make sure I enjoy the whole thing, because I don’t know how many more Olympics I’m going to.
“At the end of the day, it’s still the same swimming pool that I’m used to, and I’m just swimming up and down. Something that I’ve been doing since I was four years old, so hopefully it’s going to calm me down a lot, and I will be even more prepared for it.”
Knowing she belongs will help, even if it did take eight years between a realisation that “maybe I’m not so bad” at swimming and truly accepting her place in the sport.
The first hint she had was at the World Junior Swimming Championships in 2013, when as a “random girl from Hong Kong”, she won the 100m freestyle event and took home bronze in the 50m free.
“And the whole time I was like, what just happened? Like, how did I drop over a second to win this race?” Haughey said. “And that was my first ever international medal. It’s a junior race, but still, it’s really important to me, and that was the first time that I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I am not that bad at this’.”
Haughey’s experiences growing up are something she is keen to share with those coming behind her, and even with the World Aquatics Championships in Doha next month she still had time to chat to hundreds of children and their parents on Saturday at Diocesan Boys’ School.
There was even a demonstration in the pool, with nearly 40 Hong Kong youngsters getting a lesson from the Olympian at the Swim to Dream event, which she asked sponsors Arena to put on.
Before she stepped out to face nearly 800 people, Haughey was asked what she would say to her eight-year-old self if she was in the audience in Mong Kok.
“That I wouldn’t believe the life that I am living right now,” she said. “I always feel like this is more than what I would have thought of. This is like a movie. But also I’d tell myself, don’t give up on something, because I think around eight years old is when I really considered giving up.
“I’d tell myself to keep working hard, because even if it doesn’t seem like it then, great things are going to happen and you just have to be patient and keep going.”
