The Republic of Singapore, a sovereign city-state in Southeast Asia just one degree north of the Equator, is best known as a global financial hub. Its sensational skyscrapers and superb street food are as world-renowned as its Merlion and Marina Bay Sands resort. It was one of the last places I thought would have a rich skating history. Was I ever wrong!
Unsurprisingly for a port city with a tropical climate, Singapore's first exposure to skating wasn't on ice, but on rollers. When Singapore was under British Colonial rule in the late Victorian era, The Elite Skating Rink opened across from the Ice Works at the foot of Foot Canning. An advertisement in the July 2, 1890 issue of the "Daily Advertiser" captured the excitement captured the excitement generated by the rink. It read, "Skating! Skating!! That most fashionable of all exercises, recommended by the medical faculty, indulged in by the nobility. Strongly recommended to ladies... As everybody knows, the prettiest place in Singapore is the Elite Skating Rink." Roller skating's popularity continued well past the time of the Great War.
During World War II, several figure skaters spent time in Singapore while in service with the military. 1937 Canadian Champion in junior men's skating Peter Chance was a Sub-Lieutenant with the Royal Navy when Japan bombed the city. Mr. John Nicks, a World Champion in pairs skating, was stationed there for a time too.
In March of 1951, Singapore had its first exposure to figure skating, when the Scandinavian Ice Revue arrived to perform a charity show in aid of Singapore Boys' Town. The Revue had previously performed on tank ice in Scandinavia, Egypt, India and Hong Kong under the name Manhattan Ice Show. The cast included Winnie and Dennis Silverthorne and twelve-year-old Lydia Cloots, who joined the show in Cairo. The April 2, 1951 issue of "The Straits Times" raved, "A first-class show, it brings to Singapore a new kind of entertainment and the cast do everything on ice from badminton to cycling and from ballet to clowning. Inevitably it includes the Skaters' Waltz and the lovelies of the ballet, the international skating champions and the other members of the show really put it across. All of this is done on a stage frozen eight degrees below zero in a theatre where the temperature is around seventy eight degrees. And the result is amazing."
Holiday On Ice arrived in Singapore in April of 1954, installing ice at the Happy World Stadium amusement park. It wasn't an especially profitable venture for the tour, owing to a ticketing snafu. Four thousand members of the British Armed Forces and their families were offered discounted tickets, but far more than that number ended up showing up to see the show. Because the organizers agreed to give profits to the Armed Forces Welfare Association, Holiday On Ice didn't end up making a penny. In the years that followed, the tour returned and had considerably more success.
Pat Gregory. Photo courtesy National Library Of Australia.
So did Tivoli star Pat Gregory and her husband-manager Hal Downey. The Australian couple put together a company of sixteen performers embarked on a six-week tour of Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan and Singapore. Pat's show "Ice Follies" played to standing-room-only crowds at a nightclub called Goodwood in the summer of 1967.
The Ice Palace in Jurong. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine.
Singapore's first permanent ice rink, the Ice Palace, opened on August 10, 1974, on Yuan Ching Road in Jurong. It was installed as part of a nine-million-dollar recreational complex and open from eight in the morning until midnight on weekdays and until two in the morning on weekends. Over one hundred and sixty thousand people skated at the rink in the first two months it was open. The rink's director, Lim Yeow Yeck, offered reduced rates for "schoolchildren and housewives" and tried to schedule public skating sessions and learn-to-skate classes around them.
The Ice Palace at Kallang Leisure Park opened a few months later on a site opposite the National Sports Stadium. This rink was managed by Thomas K.S. Tan. Tan also gave "first priority to school children" and arranged classes in figure skating and hockey. Soon after, the Lion City of Skating Club was founded. An article in the February 20, 1975 issue of "New Nation" stated, "The latest craze among Singaporeans trying to get away from the rat race atmosphere and to squeeze in a little fun and recreation is, undoubtedly, ice skating. It is hardly surprising that the local crowds are all converging on the two skating rinks. For one thing, there is a lack of recreational facilities for our over two million population. So any new outlet is more than welcome. For another, ice-skating is a very cooling sport. With the blazing sun for company almost all year round, it's a refreshing change to be at the ice-cold rink... Two problems, however, arise: Distances of the two rinks from the town centre and the high costs of learning to skate (both in terms of money and possible injuries)." The fear of "possible injuries" was something that the Singaporean press would not let go of. In the first year, the Jurong and Kallang Ice Palaces were open, dozens of articles showed in newspapers warning of the dangers of skating. One claimed that two hundred people were injured at these rinks every week - suffering everything from bumps and bruises to broken teeth and broken collarbones. These reporters might have come across as fear-mongering, but it's worth noting a later rink in Singapore made the unusual rule of requiring all skaters to wear gloves... but not helmets.
Figure skating exploded in the second year the Jurong and Kallang Ice Palaces were open. The President of the Lion City Skating Club, Dr. Dennis Hangchi, founded the Singapore Ice Skating Union and began communicating with American, Australian, Japanese and ISU officials about how to best set up the organization. The first skating competition in Singapore was held in January of 1975 at the Jurong rink. There was only one judge, an ISIA instructor named Nancy (Copeland) Ackerman. The winner was eight-year-old Sharon Tan, who had only been skating for five months. She went on to win become one of the country's top coaches in the nineties.
Singapore's first National Championships (then referred to as the 'first nation-wide ice skating Championship') were held in September of 1976 at the Kallang under the patronage of Chan Chee Seng, Senior Parliamentary Secretary to Minister For Social Affairs. The National Skating Union of Japan sent six judges to help with the event, including 1954 Japanese Champion Kazuo Ohashi. There were competitions in five classes: men's, women's, ice dancing and student's boys and girls. Sharon Tan, the youngest of five competitors, won the girl's class. She received instruction from a visiting coach from Canada named Linda Sawyer. The boy's winner was fourteen-year-old Alfred Alphonso, who was taught by Nancy Ackerman. The women's champion was thirteen-year-old Terri Hangchi and the dance champions were Dorothy Lau and Raymond Cheah. Cheah didn't start skating until he was twenty-one and, like Tan, went on to become a top coach in the nineties. The winner of the men's event was a flamboyant thirty-year-old named San Nah, who worked as a costume designer at a local nightclub. His self-choreographed program included a flip, Lutz, Russian split jump and flying camel spin.
Nancy Ackerman's contributions to Singapore's skating roots are really worth mentioning. She gave talks about the sport at the public library and showed films of skating which served as important teaching tools for people who had never been exposed to the sport before. USFSA President Charles A. DeMore was part of a group of American officials and judges visited Singapore in 1977. In "Skating" magazine, he remarked, "Mrs. Ackerman has done much to spark enthusiasm and interest in figure skating in Singapore. She uses the ISIA Alpha-Beta-Gamma program to teach the basic, elementary skating skills. As the skaters become more proficient and master that program, she continues with the USFSA test structure, beginning with the Preliminary and First Tests. When we found out about her program, Mrs. Ackerman, Dr. Hangchi and Mrs. Core asked if some of our judges would judge some Singapore skaters who had been working on their Preliminary Test. We realized the difficulties in arranging a test session on such short notice but we promised to try and conduct a demonstration test session. We had eleven American judges and one Canadian judge ready at the rink the next day. We were greeted by Mr. Bobby Yeo, Executive Director and General Manager of Jurong Ice Skating Centre, who was very happy that our judges would conduct the tests. We were able to make three panels, each consisted of three judges and a judge-in-charge, and the test session was underway. The judges were: Margaret Bergland, Elaine DeMore, Margaretta [Spence] Drake, Wilma Dressel, Ethel Garwood, Gladys Hirsch, Fannie Howard, Virginia LeFevre, Fred LeFevre, Delly McDaniel, Tom Monypenny and Nancy Meiss."
Just as Singapore's figure skating future couldn't look brighter, it all came crashing down. The Jurong rink closed down suddenly in July of 1977 and when the National Championships were to be held for the first time under ISU rules in January of 1978, San Nah (by this time President of the King City Figure Skating Club) led a boycott of the competition because he was unhappy with the rules. He complained, "We will not be able to express ourselves freely and will be tied to certain compulsory manoeuvres." Nah wanted the judging panel to be all-Japanese, as it was in 1976. Due to a lack of participants, the Championships were cancelled. Just three months later, the Kallang rink closed its doors too. The closure of both rinks was a shock to the public, but things hadn't been rosy behind the scenes. Both rinks had high overhead costs, low revenue and constant issues with machinery and equipment. The Jurong rink had suffered a loss of thirty thousand dollars a month. Ultimately, the Jurong rink became a supermarket and the Kallang rink reverted to a roller rink, disco and then a food court, bowling alley and shopping area.
Left: Sharon Tan. Right: Raymond Cheah.
For a decade, figure skating in Singapore died completely out. At the time, inline skating was becoming trendy and many skaters from the Jurong and Kallang rinks navigated to other rinks that catered to 'iceless skating'. All that changed when the Fuji Ice Palace Rink opened on June 15, 1989, on the former site of the Rex Theatre at Mackenzie Road. This drew over a thousand people a day in its first months.
Walt Disney's World On Ice performed at the rink in October of that year, starring World Champion Linda Fratianne. This rink also faced financial difficulties and closed in April of 1993.
Skaters at the Fuji Ice Palace
A new Fuji Ice Palace on the third floor of the Jurong Entertainment Centre opened shortly after and in 2001, the Kallang Leisure Park rink reopened after expensive refurbishments under the name Kallang Ice World. A new Singapore Ice Skating Association was formed in 2000 and the Skate Singapore competition was established. In 2001, the Tropical Blades Ice Skating Club was formed. The Junior Ice Skating Club and various University Skating Clubs followed, but things got tricky in 2008 when the Jurong Entertainment Centre was closed for redevelopment the same year the Singapore Ice Skating Association joined the ISU as a provisional member. They almost lost their status in 2010, because they'd promised the ISU they'd have an Olympic-sized rink in 2009.
Singapore's first Olympic-sized-rink, JCube in Jurong East Mall, didn't open until April of 2012. In the meantime, Singapore's National Championships had to be held three hundred kilometers away in a different country - Malaysia.
The first skaters from Singapore to compete internationally were Sarah Paw Si Ying and Anja Chong, in the 2008 Junior Grand Prix Series events in South Africa, Mexico and Great Britain. Sarah Paw Si Ying was Singapore's first competitor at the Four Continents Championships in 2010. After winning Singapore's figure skating title and acting as the country's first competitor at the World Junior Championships in Bulgaria in 2009, Anja Chong represented Malaysia as a speed skater and won three gold medals at the 2017 Southeast Games in Kuala Lumpur. At those Games, Yu Shuran won Singapore's first international figure skating title. That same year, she was one of the country's first participants in the Asian Winter Games. She placed an impressive sixth in a field of twenty-four. Behind the scenes, things weren't at all rosy. In 2020, Shuran opened up in an Instagram post about the physical abuse she suffered while training in China. She was beaten with a skate guard, kicked by her coach's toe pick and hauled out of a car in a secluded area and beaten as a punishment for a poor training session. The horrific treatment Shuran endured enacted change. Singaporean officials and the Safe Sport Taskforce are working hard to enhance safety protocols for athletes training both home and abroad.
Though the ISU's tiresome policy of TES minimum scores has had an unsurprisingly negative effect on 'developing skating nations' like Singapore, there is much hope for the future. There are talented skaters living abroad competing internationally and many rising stars at home. It's hard to say what the country's skating future will look like, but Singapore's slow and steady approach to development may just pay off like it did for the tortoise.
Skate Guard is a blog dedicated to preserving the rich, colourful and fascinating history of figure skating. Over ten years, the blog has featured over a thousand free articles covering all aspects of the sport's history, as well as four compelling in-depth features. To read the latest articles, follow the blog on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. If you enjoy Skate Guard, please show your support for this archive by ordering a copy of "Jackson Haines: The Skating King" and pre-ordering "Sequins, Scandals & Salchows: Figure Skating in the 1980s", which will be released this fall where books are sold: https://skateguard1.blogspot.com/p/buy-book.html.