PETALING JAYA: At the age of four, Nurul Huda Abdullah, Malaysia’s queen of the pool in the 1980s, slipped through an inflatable ring-float and almost drowned in a swimming pool.
Her mother decided Nurul should take swimming lessons, and by the age of seven, she was already winning age-group competitions at the Royal Selangor Golf Club in Kuala Lumpur.
At about the same time, Jeffrey Ong, about four months older than Nurul, was getting his feet wet literally at the Penang Swimming Club.
While Jeffrey decided to focus on swimming when he was about 11 years old, Nurul had already emerged as a speed swimmer while studying in Australia.
Born Ch’ng Su-Lin, Nurul quickly made her international debut three months short of her 11th birthday in the 1983 Sea Games in Singapore, two years before her grandfather, Wee Kim Wee, became the fourth president of the republic.
Nurul did not win any medals in her breakout Sea Games but two years later in Bangkok, she cast a spell over the pool and powered her way to seven gold medals, breaking six records.
Jeffrey, who was then schooling in the UK, developed naturally as an endurance swimmer in the 400m freestyle and 1500 freestyle events.
He got off to swimming internationally at 15 and in the span of 12 months, he had gone to the Sea Games, the Asian Swimming Championships and the Olympics.
Nurul and Jeffrey touched Malaysians in a powerful way by scooping 49 international medals between them and taking their place among the best swimmers in Asia in the ’80s and ’90s.
Tonight, their stirring exploits will be relived in a six-episode television documentary, We Were Champions, that features athletes who have grown their sport, blazed a path, and brought important changes to Malaysian sport over the years.
The biographical series, produced by Gerard Benedict and Harjit Kaur, feeds the nation exactly what it needs in its 65th year of independence: solidarity, honour, and the meaning of sacrifice.
Episode 1 absorbs the prodigious appetite of Nurul and Jeffrey for hard work and their readiness to not only suffer the wearying repetition and inherent loneliness that swimming thousands of laps a week in different strokes entails, but to embrace it.
Nurul is pint-sized and it is hard to fathom how someone who does not have large feet or hands, which you need to push a huge mass of water, could be dominant in the freestyle, butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke disciplines.
At the 1985 Sea Games in Bangkok, she competed against more experienced swimmers in nine events and racked up seven gold medals, a silver and a bronze.
Over in the UK at around the same time, Jeffrey was doing well in the 400m and 1500m freestyle events in junior championships.
At her first Asian Games in Seoul in 1986, Nurul would set a ridiculously high bar that future generations would struggle to eclipse.
The 14-year-old not only became the first Malaysian to win an Asian Games swimming medal, but she also bagged two silver and two bronze medals.
Then came the time when Malaysian swimming fans were spoiled to have the two 15-year-olds competing at the 1987 Sea Games in Jakarta.
Nurul’s versatility helped her pick up seven gold medals and a silver in eight events.
Such had been Nurul’s majestic influence over the pool that her second place finish behind 17-year-old Elfira Nasution of Indonesia in the 200m individual medley became a big talking point.
In her moment of triumph, Elfira gushed: “There is nothing greater than beating the queen of the pool. I used to trail her between six and nine seconds, and I couldn’t imagine that I would one day beat her.”
Jeffrey was built for swimming success, with a powerful 6-foot-1 frame, size 11 feet that act as flippers and a 6-foot-6-inch wingspan.
He finished first in the lung-bursting 400m freestyle and 1500m freestyle races, and became the first Malaysian male swimmer to win a Sea Games gold.
In 1988, Nurul and Jeffrey continued to inspire the nation with a dream display at the Asian Swimming Championships in Guangzhou, China.
Nurul won two silver medals in the 400m freestyle and 800m freestyle and bronze in the 200m freestyle while Jeffrey took silver in both his pet events.
Their outstanding splash in China earned them a ticket to the 1988 Seoul Olympics where they gained valuable experience swimming against the best swimmers in the world.
That year, Jeffrey and Nurul were voted National Sportsman and National Sportswoman of the Year, a recognition that underlined the teenage phenoms’ dazzling skills, their uniquely steely work ethic and determination to be the best.
It was Nurul’s fourth consecutive National Sportswoman of the Year title, and she would go on to grab her fifth laurel in the following year.
Jeffrey’s award came eight years after his champion swimmer sister Katerina was voted National Sportswoman of the Year in 1980 along with sprinter Rabuan Pit as the top male athlete.
At the 1989 Sea Games in Kuala Lumpur, the nation was once again stirred by their extraordinary nymph, Nurul, who swept eight gold medals and two silver medals from the 10 events she competed in, while Jeffrey bagged gold in his favoured events.
Nurul remains the only Malaysian athlete to win 10 medals in a single international meet.
Her heroics ended at the 1990 Beijing Asian Games where she did not win any medal.
Nurul, whose magnitude of achievements is impossible to exaggerate, retired at 18. Her retirement made headlines, with the press recalling her eight years of high-octane international competitions when she hauled a record 22 gold, eight silver and four bronze medals.
This little kid had set 10 national swimming records at the height of her career, and at 15, she was a recipient of the International Olympic Council’s Award for women in sport.
Nurul tells the interviewer in We Are Champions: “Sometimes, I think my kids don’t believe that I managed to do all those things at such a young age.”
For Jeffrey, it was a different story. He shone at the Beijing Asian Games, with silver in the 1500m freestyle, making him the first Malaysian male swimmer to win a medal at the Asiad.
A year later at the World Student Games in England, he won the silver in the 1500m freestyle, set a new Malaysian record of 15min 23.61s – which remains untouched – and became the 14th fastest swimmer in the world over the event.
Although he did not fare well at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he set a new national record in the 400m individual medley in his final Sea Games in Singapore the following year.
Jeffrey represented Malaysia in four Sea Games, two Olympics, the 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games, among others, winning 15 international medals – nine gold, five silver and a bronze.
Asked about his sporting relationship with Nurul, Jeffrey said they got along well and supported each other.
“She coped so well with the tremendous amount of pressure, placed on her by the Malaysian public and by herself as well,” he said.
Today, at the age of 50, Nurul and Jeffrey, both of whom have been inducted into the Olympic Council of Malaysia’s Hall of Fame, coach junior swimmers and give motivational talks. - FMT
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