Five-Time Paralympic Gold Medallist Yip Pin Xiu Wants People To Support Local Sports

Yip Pin Xiu, 29, is as radiant as the six gleaming Paralympic medals—five golds and a silver across four Games— she has under her belt. Warm, positive and terribly sweet, the national swimmer, undoubtedly one of the best athletes to hail from our little red dot, is all smiles when I meet her at the car park. Already seated in her wheelchair, she rolls with confidence to the studio, independent and full of enthusiasm for the shoot. Never one to rest on her laurels, Yip, fresh off wins at the Tokyo Games, already has her sights set on the Paris Paralympics in 2024.

Her journey, she lets on, started when she was just five, when the whole family would accompany her brother to his swimming lessons. “I’d usually be playing in the baby pool by myself,” Yip shares. “Eventually, I asked my mum if I could swim too. She asked the coach, who said, ‘Yeah!’ She had a student who was an amputee, so she knew that it was possible for people with physical disabilities to learn swimming.”

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Yip took to the water immediately. “I love the freedom of the water,” she says. “On land, I felt heavy. Sometimes, walking was tough. But in the water, I could do anything that anybody else could do.” Yip’s condition, known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, causes progressive weakening of the limbs and eventually affected her ability to walk. She found relief and independence when she started using a wheelchair, as it meant she no longer had to rely on other people to get around.

“I felt very different when I was in primary school,” she discloses. “There was no one in my school who had a disability and there was no media representation. You don’t see disabled people on the streets either. I think the culture was such that if you have a disability, you don’t really go out. I just felt very alone when I was a kid.”

It was only after Yip started competitive swimming at the age of 12 that she found true freedom—connecting with people with disabilities and learning from role models in order to carve out the life she wanted for herself. She credits her achievements in the pool to the many people in her life, including friends and family, coaches and fellow athletes, who support and cheer her on. The 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games was particularly challenging, not just physically but also mentally. Grappling with the uncertainties of the pandemic, not knowing if the Games would go ahead or be cancelled, Yip revealed that she would sometimes get emotional. “I’m very fortunate to have support and a network of people I can speak to,” she says.

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Yip brought home two gold medals for her swimming events—the 50m and 100m backstroke—at the Tokyo Games. Her success in defending the titles she had earned at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio sparked a conversation about the disparity between the treatment of Olympic gold medallists and Paralympic gold medallists—especially the cash incentives. When swimmer Joseph Schooling clinched the historic gold medal at the Rio Olympics in 2016, he was rewarded with $1 million. Compare this to the cash payout of $100,000 when Yip won Singapore’s first Paralympic gold medal in 2008, and the $200,000 she originally received for each of the gold medals she won this year.

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In October 2021, with DBS coming on board as a sponsor for the Singapore National Paralympic Council’s Athletes Achievement Awards, the prize money for the two gold medals Yip won in Tokyo was upped to $800,000. Yip maintains that the support she received from Sport Singapore (a statutory board of the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth) has been the same and she has never felt that she was not a priority as an athlete. She’s happy, though, that steps were taken to right “the disparity that was quite clear in the eyes of the public”. That said, she asserts that she doesn’t “swim for the money” and is simply “glad that people are fighting for us”.

Yip hopes that Singaporeans will continue to support all Team Singapore athletes, just like how people in the UK support their national footballers even during the off seasons. To her, this means fostering a love for sports, following the athletes throughout their journeys and not being just a fair‐weather supporter.

“It takes a village to raise a champion,” she quips. “The more people there are in this village, the better it will be.”

Photographed by Jayden Tan
Styled by Gracia Phang
Art direction: Windy Aulia
Makeup and hair: Grego using Pat McGrath Labs and Keune
Photographer’s assistant: Aisyah Hisham
Stylist’s assistant: Nadia Lim