'Wave of shock, despair, disappointment': Singapore swimmer Quah Ting Wen recounts Asian Games relay disqualification

SINGAPORE: The day before the women’s 4x100m medley relay finals at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, Singapore swimmer Quah Ting Wen was not feeling entirely well - she was coming down with a bug.

She decided to forgo the individual 50m butterfly event she had made the finals for, so she could focus on giving it her all to the team race.

“I feel like I only have one good swim left in me,” she told her coaches. “I want to not swim my individual event, so I have everything in me … and I want to give it all to the relay.”

The coaches were on board with the plan. But she could feel her body breaking down.

“I was really caffeinated. My whole body was buzzing. We were 20 minutes late for the event and I was getting really nervous. And we're behind the blocks and it's loud,” she said, recalling the events leading up to her mistake on Sep 29.

When she saw her sister Jing Wen swimming towards her, and it was time to take over as the last member of the relay for the freestyle leg, she instinctively knew what she was supposed to do. They had practised it with each other over 20 times. 

But as she dived into the water, she knew something was wrong.

“I actually knew the moment when I was doing the relay exchange for my sister that I might have made a mistake,” she told CNA in a special podcast on the mental health struggles of elite athletes.

For the first half of her race, she was running on adrenaline and “could barely feel my body”, she said.

“The whole time, in my mind, I was thinking 'Did I do something wrong? I might have messed up’”, she added.  

She managed to put it out of her mind and finish the race, but she did not look at the scoreboard and watched the reactions of her team instead. 

The other two members of the relay team - sisters