Wushu exponent Ng Zhe Nin wins gold for Singapore at 2026 Youth Olympic Games

SINGAPORE – Singaporean wushu exponent Ng Zhe Nin won an historic medal at the 2026 Youth Olympic Games (YOG) as she claimeed gold in the women’s taijiquan combined final on Nov 3.

At the Dakar Expo Center in Senegal, where the Chinese martial art featured as a medal sport at the YOG for the first time, the 16-year-old finished with a combined score of 18.713 points.

Chinese Taipei’s Chu Yu-en was second with 18.499 points, with Germany’s Mia Zhou (18.482) took bronze.

Zhe Nin had placed first in the morning’s taijishan after registering 9.353 points, before topping the taijiquan later in the day with 9.360 points to secure her spot on the podium.

This caps an impressive maiden YOG campaign for the teenager, who earned herself one of the eight berths in the final by topping the women’s taijiquan combined standings with a score of 18.653 after both preliminary routines.

While this was her YOG debut, Zhe Nin, who picked up the sport at the age of 10, is no stranger to the international stage having competed and won medals at events such as the World Junior Wushu Championships.

At this year’s edition of the world championships in Tianjin, China, she bagged golds in the girls’ youth taijiquan and taijijian, as well as the girls’ youth taijishan silver, adding to the gold and silver she won two years before that in Brunei.

This marks the first time that wushu has been included in an Olympic programme as a medal sport, after previously appearing as a demonstration sport at the 2014 Nanjing YOG.

Only the taolu discipline in which athletes perform choreographed routines that a team of judges score was contested this time.

The other main discipline is sanda, a full-contact combat sport where competitors fight against each other.

Zhe Nin’s gold in Senegal is the 12th medal – and third gold – won by a Singaporean athlete across four editions of the quadrennial event.

Sailors Bernie Chin and Samantha Yom, who won the boys’ and girls’ one person dinghy, respectively, at the 2014 Games in Nanjing, are the Republic’s other YOG champions.

At the inaugural YOG held in Singapore 16 years ago, the nation’s athletes won two silvers (swimming, table tennis) and five bronzes (taekwondo, archery, sailing, football), before the two golds (sailing) and two silvers (shooting) at the next edition in 2014.

These include the mixed team bronze won by archer Abdul Dayyan Jaffar and Turkey’s Begunhan Unsal in 2010 and shooter Teh Xiu Yi’s mixed team 10m air pistol silver with Egypt’s Ahmed Mohamed four years later, which do not count towards the individual national Olympic committee’s (NOC) medal tally.

Instead, any medals won by combined teams made up from athletes from different countries are credited to mixed NOCs in the medal table.

Singapore did not win any medals at the 2018 Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Oct 31-Nov 13 Dakar Games were initially supposed to take place in 2022, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the ongoing Games, Singapore are represented by 14 athletes competing in archery, athletics, badminton, 3x3 basketball, fencing, artistic gymnastics, sailing, table tennis and wushu.

Kimberly Kwek joined The Straits Times in 2019 as a sports journalist and has since covered a wide array of sports, including golf and sailing.