Voices echoing off the tiles. Chlorine burning at the nose. Lights glaring from overhead across the flat surface of the pool.
Once swimmer Sabina Ma breaks through the surface tension, though, everything else fades away. “The moment when you enter the water, you’ll forget it all. You’re just thinking about the technique,” she told Macao News.
The former team Macao member broke a Macao record at the World Aquatics Masters Championships last month, taking home the gold in the 35-39 age group 200 metre individual medley event. Despite already having seven local records under her belt, the 36-year-old says she’s far from done with competing.
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Remaining active for more than a decade is a rarity among swimmers in Macao. Although the SAR team, supported by the Sports Bureau, is equipped with qualified staff and professional facilities to nurture up-and-coming aquatic talent, few athletes stay in the sport after entering the workforce. It’s just not something swimmers typically consider, local swimmer Chao Man Hou told Macao Magazine previously.
But Ma has been competing for more than 20 years. Now in the Masters class (for adult competitors above the age of 25), Ma told Macao News that she hopes to continue winning medals for the SAR.
Sabina Ma’s path to competitive swimming
Like many other athletes competing under the Macao banner, Ma entered the competitive scene through the summer activity pipeline. “As a child, I didn’t intentionally set competitions as a goal,” she said, but at the age of 11, a coach saw her potential and suggested she join the national team.
“It was a very natural process,” Ma said.
Contrary to what her accolades might suggest, Ma was not a child prodigy. According to her, she didn’t even meet the qualifying times for competitions during the first two years of her Team Macao stint. Ma still remembers the sting of disappointment: “Everyone else got to compete, but I couldn’t.”
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Things started looking up for young Ma around the age of 12, a year she sees as a turning point in her career. That’s the year the then-middle-schooler started participating in international competitions, including the East Asian Games, Asian Games and World Swimming Championships.
In 2005, Ma broke the first of many Macao records by achieving a landmark time of 59.93 in her leg of the 4×100 metre freestyle relay at the Macao Open Swimming Championships. This was the first time a woman from Macao had achieved a below-minute time for the event.
While proud of the result, Ma says she wasn’t satisfied with the record. Her first reaction when she saw the historic time? “I thought I could do more,” she said. “I hoped my result could improve.”
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Despite having loftier aspirations, the achievement was still a personal victory. Being featured in local newspapers helped Ma convince her school that swimming was a worthy pursuit. “They started making sports more of a priority,” she said.
That same year, the Macao Swimming Association also sent her to train with China’s national team, an experience Ma describes as one of the most gruelling of her career. “[It was] maybe two to three times the training load in Macao,” said Ma. “You realise how small you are.”
But Team China’s training camp was also a chance to prove herself. “I would say I’m more of the persistent type,” Ma said. By working on balancing training and rest, she managed to keep up after getting past the initial shock of the intense schedule. The memory, though, has stayed with her. “That was a huge challenge for me.”
Ma would go on to break Macao’s women’s records for the short-course 100 metre freestyle in 2009, as well as both short- and long-course records for the 50- and 100-metre butterfly races. As part of a team, she also won the 4×200 metre freestyle relay in 2014, making her one of the city’s most decorated female swimmers.
The development of swimming in Macao
Having been on the scene for some time, Ma has witnessed the evolution of competitive swimming in Macao. “There’ve been pretty big changes,” she said, a progression illustrated by the local team’s training venues. Ma used to practice at the Estoril pool, one of the city’s oldest swimming facilities, before the Olympic Sports Center was built and, more recently, the Athlete Training and Development Centre in Cotai.
Newer generations of swimmers also have access to more resources, said Ma: “Now, our athletes have more equipment and facilities to use for both land and water training and also for recovery, but in our time, that wasn’t the case.”
As a masters swimmer, Ma’s regimen is no longer as intense as the one she once followed, but she has still been able to maintain her skills. “It’s an investment,” she explained, citing a willingness in her youth to endure arduous endurance tests: “when you’ve built up your personal foundation, that’s when you can get far.”
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That said, Ma has not let up on the training: she puts in extra hours at the pool while supplementing with drills at the gym. Time spent with friends is something she’s often had to sacrifice, but Ma sees the tradeoff as necessary. “Training hours are very few for the masters class, so I don’t want to waste them,” she said. After a long day of work, Ma’s husband and mother always have dinner ready for her, one reason why she considers them her biggest supporters.
Even though she’s already been in the game for far longer than most of Macao’s other elite swimmers, Ma’s showing no signs of slowing down. “In the future, I want to [continue to] represent Macao in the Masters class on the global or Asian stage,” she said.
