Singapore Youth Champions Crowned

The Singapore National Youth Sailing Championship concluded on Saturday with the largest ever fleet of 404 sailors competing in eight classes including international entries from Belgium, Denmark, France and Malaysia.

The National Youth Championship is one of the two selection events (the second being the Sentosa Optimist Open Championship in June) for the IODA Optimist World Sailing Championship in July. No doubt also on the mind of many of the young competitors was that Singapore will host the first-ever Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in August 2010, where 100 sailors will compete across four events, for boys and girls in both the Byte CII one-person dinghy and Techno 293 windsurfer. For the local sailors, the championships were also an important lead up to the trials for Singapore’s team for the 2009 Asian Youth Games, held in the same events as the YOG and also hosted at Singapore.

Fifteen year old Terence CHOO took top honours in the Byte class, where a total of 63 sailors competed. In the Techno windsurfer, the other YOG event, Leonard ONG of Singapore claimed the top prize. The highly-competitive Optimist event went Ryan LO of Singapore and other Singaporean winners were Denise LIM Ke Xin and Sara TAN Li Ching in the 420, QUEK Ju Lian and Thomas KWOK Wei Jie in the 420 non-spinnaker and LOW Wen Chun and Jonathan Russel CHEW in the Hobie 16. Malaysia broke the home dominance with victories in the Laser and Laser Radials events courtesy of, respectively, Harrithammy NASSUTION (MAS) and Khairulnizam MOHD AFENDY (MAS).

Full Results – click here