Going for Gold

We catch up with two-time World Masters swimming champion Cindy Ong to find out what she has been up to in and out of the water

- Chong Jinn Xiung

Cindy Ong did Malaysia proud when she won five golds and two silvers at the 18th Fina World Masters Championships back in 2019 in Gwangju, South Korea. The 37-year-old swimmer is the first Malaysian to win gold at the World Masters Championships. For those unfamiliar, Ong hails from a family of professional swimmers; her older brother Allen represented Malaysia at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics. She also has an aunt, Ong Mei Lin, who was one of the first women to represent Malaysia in the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

The Ipoh-born lass maintained that she was never pressured to take up the sport. “I was given the opportunity to learn and decide if it’s something that I wanted to do in the long run.”

Ong says that she did not set out to be a record breaker at first, but it happens that she keeps breaking them. She recalls breaking her first record at fiveand-a-half years old when she smashed the 30m butterfly record at the Ipoh Swimming Club back in 1990. It would be the first of many as she would later go on to set state and national records.

The highlight of her career during her days as a national swimmer was during the 2004 Sukma Games where she won six gold medals. Following that she took a 12-year hiatus from the sport, settled down and started a family.

Ong’s eyes lit up as we talked about her three children: Hayden Kole Kit, Kiara Belle Kit and Connor Matthew Kit, whom she views as her pride and joy. Her two eldest children have inherited their mother’s love for swimming and are high achievers in their own right.