Cambodia’s figure skaters hope to emulate Jamaica’s bobsled team and make it to the Olympics
Dodging beginners while training on country’s lone ice rink, team reached high enough level to compete at the Southeast Asian Games; now its ambitious head coach has her sights set on the Olympics. Pictures by Omar Havana
Sen Bunthoeurn is stretching by the side of his nation’s only ice rink.
“How are you feeling?” I ask. In reply, he mimes throwing up – three times for good measure. It’s safe to assume he’s nervous.
Uplifting music blasts over a stereo system before a booming voice announces the making of history: “The first skater to represent Cambodia is Sen Bunthoeurn.”
It’s mid-August and Sen Bunthoeurn, a member of Cambodia’s ice-skating team, is going through his paces at a dress rehearsal, having spent every spare moment of the past couple of years on the rink, preparing to compete at the Southeast Asian Games, in Kuala Lumpur.
“I started learning to skate in 2013, but not figure skating, just the hockey style,” the 27-year-old says. “I only started figure skating in 2014.”
Sen Bunthoeurn, who had left his rice-farming family in Takéo province in 2009 to study at university, saw a newspaper advertisement for a position teaching ice skating to children in May 2013. Despite having no experience, he applied.
“I was really interested in skating,” he says. “I had seen people roller blading and it looked really cool, so when I saw the ad, I wanted to ice skate. They needed staff who could skate, but I didn’t know how to. I just promised them that I would try hard. They said, ‘We’ll let you do it for 15 days – if you can improve you can keep doing it.’”