CALVIN Kang hardly ever finished first since he took up athletics eight years ago.

'I was always second or third at national championships,' he recalled.

That changed in October when he clocked 10.55sec to win the 100m sprint at a meet in Sri Lanka.

Kang, 17, became the youngest - and fastest - Singaporean to qualify for the current South-east Asia Games.

The performance guaranteed him a slot in Singapore's 4x100m relay squad. The athletics events start on Friday.

His inclusion underscores an intriguing change in track and field.Singapore's 21-member team of runners, throwers and jumpers is the youngest ever dispatched to the SEA Games.

This happened after the Singapore Athletics Association (SAA) faced up to a curious paradox of the Games.

While the Games feature Asean's best, the quality, especially in track and field, is low internationally.

'The SEA Games standard is really the level of the world junior championships,' said SAA's technical director Ralph Mouchbahani.

'This means that the very best in this region fare only at the level of the juniors in the best-performing countries in the world.'

That is why Singapore's athletes have rarely succeeded beyond the SEA Games, he believes.
Apart from unusually gifted and committed athletes like C. Kunalan, who came closest to an Asian Games gold medal in the 100m when he finished second in 1966, the system could not produce a reliable pool of talent consistently.

So Mr Mouchbahani, a German with extensive experience, set about re-configuring Singapore's talent development scheme after he was hired five years ago by SAA president Loh Lin Kok.

The obvious start was to develop programmes that would lift the standard of Singapore's best junior athletes to the level of the SEA Games.

The success of junior athletes like Kang, who make it to the Games on merit, confirmed the viability of the plan.

The average age of the track and field team is 21 at this SEA Games, compared with 27 previously, he said. Five of the 10 athletes under 21 years old are teenagers.

By qualifying on merit, the juniors are medal contenders, as they had to beat the bronze- medal marks set at the previous Games.
'No one will accept that you spend public money to support athletes to the SEA Games only to be told that it is a child's game,' explained Singapore athletics team manager Chan Chee Wei.

To be sure, track and field is not the only area teeming with teenagers.

The Singapore sailors are overwhelmingly young, and so are several shooters.

But sailing has an age-limit event like the Optimist, which partly skews a team's age profile. Optimist sailors cannot be older than 15. SingaporeSailing, the national association, is sending a young squad to Thailand for another reason: most of Singapore's elite sailors are
elsewhere, training in Australia to qualify for next year's Olympics in Beijing.

Shooting has its teenage gold medallists, but youth does not figure in the making of a top shooter. A SEA Games gold medallist can be as young as 17 (Jonathan Koh and Jasmine Ser) or as athletically elderly as 39 (Gai Bin).

The track and field team is different. The best athletes are actually the best on offer, and they are young.

Still, the point of the SAA scheme is not solely about winning medals. A month before Kang's feat, university undergraduate Amanda Choo, 20, became the Republic's fastest woman. She clocked 12.21sec at the Singapore Open to beat the 12.23sec-mark set 18 years ago by Prema Govindan at the 1989 SEA Games. Choo finished fifth.

But, the record suggests that Choo can achieve her dream of being the first Singaporean woman to break the 12-second barrier.

The SAA plan includes the development of a young generation of coaches trained in sports science.

National coaches Muhamad Hosni and Hamkah Afik are both 35, and part of a panel of national coaches set up under the programme.

They were not only former top athletes, but are trained in sports science.

'In my time, my coach and I did not have the benefit of sports science,' said Mr Hosni, who was one of Asia's finest sprinters in the early 90s.

'Now, our programme allows us to take an athlete as far as he can go in a trackable, systematic way.'

That was how Kang managed to shave a couple of hundredths of a second off his best time, which made the difference between being swift and swiftest.

'We knew he could run faster and it was a matter of refining his technique systematically,' said Mr Hamkah.

The SAA's national panel took over Kang's training this year, with the Sports School's approval.

What next? 'We haven't reached the ideal level yet because we are catching up with 30 years of work,' said Mr Mouchbahani.

'Now, we are getting results in bits and pieces.'

By developing junior athletes like Kang, the SAA is setting the stage for athletes to develop beyond SEA Games standards when they mature, said Mr Mouchbahani.

'They may not have won medals yet, but their performance shows that we now have athletes who can hit a higher mark than the SEA Games, reliably and consistently as they mature,' he said.

'By 2010 or 2012, we can expect them to reach Olympic qualifying standards,' said Mr Mouchbahani.

What about medals? 'A system can only take an athlete so far because other countries have systems too and are not sleeping,' he replied.

'Whether an athlete finishes first, third or eighth after that, depends on himself and his rivals on the day of competition.

'The important thing is to have a proper system in place which provides a committed athlete with the best chance of qualifying for the Olympics.'

Read more stories on the 24th SEA Games here.