Asian Games 2023: Shanti Pereira returns to warm welcome, even as she plans ahead for Olympics

SINGAPORE — Shanti Pereira made her triumphant return to Singapore on Thursday (5 October), after winning a gold and a silver at the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games. The women's 200m winner wore a wide grin as she greeted her parents, relatives, friends and well-wishers at Changi Airport Terminal 1.

But even amid the warmth of her homecoming, the 27-year-old is already making plans to improve herself, ahead of next year's major event - the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Indeed, the Olympics will prove to be her biggest challenge, as top sprinters from the likes of the United States and Jamaica dominate the short sprints. In fact, her Asiad-winning time of 23.03 seconds in the 200m would put her only in eighth spot at the final at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

Nonetheless, Pereira - who has already secured a Paris Games spot in the women's 200m - is ready to put in the effort after taking a well-earned break after her monumental Asian Games triumph.

"It's a lot of small technical things that I can definitely work on - things like my foot position, hip position and stuff like that, that ultimately contributes to milliseconds," she told reporters at the airport.

"Each step has a millisecond, you multiply that by the amount of sets I'm doing, it will cut down a lot of timings during training and yeah, hopefully I can run faster."

Past setbacks made victory even sweeter

Small steps are exactly what Pereira has taken throughout this year in order to reach the pinnacle of Asian sprinting in Hangzhou. Since March, she has broken the national records of the 100m and 200m sprints on multiple occasions - six times for the century sprint and four times for the 200m.

And she delivered during a busy year in which she was involved in four major athletics meets. She won both the 100m and 200m golds at the SEA Games in May and the Asian Athletics Championships in July, set her fourth 200m national mark at the World Athletics Championships in August, before landing the coveted Asian Games gold and silver medals.

It was a remarkable feat of excellence, especially since she had endured years of injury setbacks and loss of form - something which she said made her eventual Asian Games triumphs much sweeter.

"That's exactly what I was thinking when I crossed the finish line after the 200m," she told Yahoo Southeast Asia.

"I've been so blessed with every opportunity I had this whole year and, on top of that, the whole journey I had to get there. Also the win was even better with my parents being in the stands, as well as people who have been in my support system for a very long time."

Inspiring others to dream big

As the athlete which ended Singapore's 49-year wait for an Asian Games track-and-field gold medal, Pereira hopes her Hangzhou feats can inspire many more athletes to aim for greatness in the years to come.

"I really hope my story can somehow inspire not just track-and-field athletes, but also people from every sport who are thinking of pursuing it a bit more seriously than they are now," she said.

“For me, I found something that I love to do quite early on and I just worked hard at it, pushed for it and I didn't give up because this is what I wanted to do. If anyone else is feeling the same way as me, I'd say go for it, don’t be afraid to dream big.

"It does not have to be a scary thing, but you have to put in hard work and sacrifice a lot of things to reach the goal and get what you want.”

And Pereira will continue to dream big, as she aims to shine in the biggest stage of them all - next year's Olympics.

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