From choir girl to MMA Asian Games gold: How Tiffany Teo overcame adversity to make history

NAGOYA – Hitting and submitting her opponents into submission, or a knockout, is what Tiffany Teo has done over a 10-year career in mixed martial arts (MMA).

Growing up, however, Teo was only hitting high notes, as a member of her school choir.

On Sept 22, the 36-year-old was well on song at the Asian Games in Nagoya, where she clinched Singapore’s first gold medal with an overtime victory in the women’s traditional 60kg final.

At the Nagoya City Inae Sports Centre, she defeated Khilola Sobirova of Uzbekistan to round off a sensational Asian Games debut campaign.

“I was never into sports growing up,” said a bespectacled Teo in an interview with The Straits Times after the medal ceremony.

“In primary school I was in choir, in secondary school I was in choir. It was not even because I liked singing, but it was the most chill CCA (co-curricular activity) and I could sit in an air-conditioned room. I hated PE (physical education) classes.”

But when she was 17, she took up taekwondo as a way of keeping fit before Muay Thai caught her interest when she was in university. Soon after she started training at a gym and she also took up boxing, but struggled to find opponents in her weight class.

That was when she was offered an opportunity to try MMA, with a promotion on the lookout for female fighters.

She accepted her first MMA fight on just two weeks’ notice, but enjoyed it enough to continue. Teo made her professional MMA debut in 2016, winning her first three fights before signing with One Championship.

She registered an 8-2 record with the MMA promotion from 2016 to 2022.

But a strawweight title fight against China’s Xiong Jing Nan in January 2018 derailed her progress.

The Singaporean took such a beating that the referee was forced to stop the fight in the fourth of the five-round bout. It left her with a swollen face and ears and she avoided going home for a week so that her family did not have to see her injuries.

Looking back, Teo said that the loss was the defining turning point of her career.

She said: “I felt like that was a loss that I needed to have to improve as a fighter, because it made me realise that I don’t have the skill set to be the fighter that I aspire to be. It was one of the biggest losses of my career.

“Because I didn’t just lose, I got beat up on international TV. My face was bruised up. My ear blew up after the fight, and I needed surgeries. It was a hard pill to swallow.”

“But in retrospect, I’m glad that happened because if that didn’t happen, I might not be the fighter I am today.”

After another fight in Nov 2018 – which she won – Teo took a break from fighting to recover and returned in 2020 to fight four more times under One. Then came a period in the wilderness for the wiry fighter, as she did not fight for nearly three years.

Teo explained that after beating Indian fighter Ritu Phogat in Sept 2022, she dropped from strawweight to atomweight in search of more regular fights and hoped to challenge then-champion Angela Lee. But a combination of circumstances kept her inactive for a period: Lee stepped away from competition following the death of her sister and later retired, One appeared to shift some focus away from MMA towards kickboxing and Muay Thai, and there were few suitable MMA bouts made available to her.

She also felt there was some “miscommunication” with the promotion, adding that even if there were few fight offers, they often came at short notice. So she decided to wait for her contract to expire.

In a sport where fighters typically spend weeks preparing for a bout and are paid only when they compete, Teo said she struggled during this period.

“It took me a while to embrace the journey because I was always very goal orientated during my professional career,” said Teo.

“I always saw myself as an athlete, as an aspiring world champion. But I wasn’t given the opportunity to pursue this, so it made me question a lot of stuff, like my identity. I fell in and out of love with the sport throughout the process. There were times when I felt that I’m going to just retire, and just do something else.”

During this dark period, Teo and her husband Sim Kai Xiong – who is also her coach – co-founded Homeground MMA, where she coached and also worked as a social media manager.

In May 2025, she left One and returned to the octagon a month later with Chinese promotion JCK MMA. There she faced China’s Liang Na and lost via submission but would serendipitously gain something more valuable.

Liang’s coaches were impressed and told her that MMA would be making its Asian Games debut. With their encouragement, she contacted Mixed Martial Arts Association of Singapore president Vincent Ng.

At the Asiad, MMA is competed on a mat instead of a cage with modified rules. Athletes compete in martial arts uniforms with shin guards for protection, and dropping knees on downed opponents is prohibited.

She earned her Asiad spot at the Asian Mixed Martial Arts Championships in Tashkent in May.

In Uzbekistan, she lost the gold to Sobirova but in Nagoya she gained revenge. While her rival’s taunting then had unsettled her, this time she was prepared.

Teo’s win came in overtime after both athletes were judged to have won one round each. After the victory, the Singaporean broke down in tears before her husband Sim hoisted her onto his shoulders.

The waterworks were not simply triggered by her triumph, but the journey she had taken to get here.

She plans to pay it forward and in December she hopes to kickstart a new fight promotion called Reign Championship to feature amateur and professional bouts, with the goal of developing the sport locally.

When asked how she would have reacted when told at her lowest point in 2018 that she would go on to become an Asian champion, she replied: “I think my younger self would tell me, ‘No fxxxxxxg way.’ Especially coming from a background where I didn’t even like sports.”

In Japan, this former choir girl delivered the sweetest note of all: Singapore’s first gold of the Games.