China-born athletes sue Singapore AAA

SINGAPORE: Two China-born athletes, wooed over from the mainland as teenagers to represent Singapore, are suing the country's athletics association after they claimed they were unfairly dumped from its foreign talent scheme for not meeting performance targets.

The case involving shot putter Luan Wei and female hammer thrower E Xiaoxu has cast a cloud over the country's high-profile foreign talent programme – one of Singapore's key avenues to winning potential gold at Asian and Olympic level.

Luan and Xiaoxu are asking the Singapore Amateur Athletic Association for back pay, loss of earnings and “damages to be assessed for their education, including at university level,'' court documents showed.

Last year, their parents claimed S$1 million in compensation after they were dumped. Their claims were brushed aside by athletics officials.

Luan was 16 and Xiaoxu 14 when they first met Singapore officials in 1999, court documents filed by the pair showed.

They are now working as sales assistants.

Both also claim the association rescinded on its promise to help them get Singapore citizenship and failed to provide them with adequate English language tutorials.

In court documents filed in the High Court, their lawyer Edmond Pereira said no performance targets were set until four years after they arrived, and still, they were medal-placed in every meet they competed in.

Pereira said they had wasted “the past seven years in Singapore, where they did not attend a single day of school.''

Luan was about to enter university in Shanghai when he was enticed to leave China, court documents said.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say there are hundreds of foreigners either in national squads or feeder schemes in a number of sports in Singapore. The country only recently launched its own sports school to identify its own young talent.

The city-state, with hardly any sporting history, is heavily reliant on foreign-born athletes.

The mainstays of its national soccer team – ranked 99th in the world alongside Rwanda – are from Africa and England.

Its top women's table-tennis player and Olympic semi-finalist, Li Jiawei, was born in China, while Ronald Susilo, the country's leading badminton player, comes from Indonesia.

 

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