Andrew Sanders, SingaporeSailing's CEO -- Photo: Wee Teck Hian

ON THE penultimate day of the sailing competition at the 24th SEA Games in Pattaya, Thailand, the Republic's 25-strong team of sailors looked on track for at least five gold medals after leading the field in the 420 men's, 470 men's, Laser Radial, Optimist (girls) and Super Mod. With Russell Kan in second spot for the Optimist (boys), a sixth gold was well within reach.

In the end, though, the sailors took home four gold, six silver and three bronze medals, with gold coming from the 470 men's (Roy Tay and Chung Pei Ming), 470 women's (Dawn Liu and Elizabeth Tan), 420 men's (Justin Liu and Sherman Cheng) and Optimist girls (Rachel Lee).

The gold haul was right on target for SingaporeSailing.

After winning seven golds in Manila 2005, the national sports association fielded their youngest team — average age 18 — for this year's SEA Games and had targeted four gold medals.

The team arrived in Singapore yesterday with the official contingent and speaking at Changi Airport, SingaporeSailing chief executive officer Andrew Sanders (picture) said: "This year, we decided to go with a new team as the Olympic programme takes priority and there was a clash in schedules.

"A number of the sailors were not in Thailand as the bulk of them are in Australia training for the world championships.

"After the 2002 Asian Games, we took three years to put together the 2005 SEA Games and 2006 Asian Games teams.

"We took three years to train them in a 'winning mode', which essentially is training sailors to deal with distractions, competition simulations and dealing with the pressure of big events like the SEA Games. With this new team, we only had six months to do that … but this puts us in a better position for the 2010 Asian Games."

Read more stories on the 24th SEA Games here.