Soh Rui Yong has miscalculated the time difference between London and Singapore and gone for a run when we were due to speak over Zoom. He can’t push our appointment back but doesn’t want to break a promise. So he does the next best thing: he brings me on the run with him. It’s just as well we’re speaking virtually; if I had to conduct an interview while running, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the end of the street. Soh doesn’t even break his stride as he fields questions. It’s why I’m a writer, and he’s the holder of four Singapore national records in long-distance running.

Despite such accomplishments—on top of the 5,000-metre, 10,000-metre, half-marathon and marathon national records, Soh also has two gold medals and a silver medal from three Southeast Asian (SEA) Games—the Singapore National Olympic Council (SNOC) has chosen not to send him to the Asian Games in Hangzhou in late September. The council accused him of making “disparaging and derisive remarks about others”, which they felt undermined “the sincerity of his commitment to avoid posting controversial content on social media”. This decision caused a stir in Singapore, sparking conversations about what should be reasonably expected of athletes.

Soh thinks talks are going on behind the scenes to get SNOC to reverse its decision, but isn’t privy to the details. He can only wait. “Basically their word is the law lah. If they want something to happen, it’ll happen,” he tells me before quoting a well-known Singaporean phrase: “I’ve heard people describe it as ‘ownself check ownself’.”

This isn’t Soh’s first run-in with the authorities. He’d already been forced to sit out the 2019 and 2021 SEA Games, and wasn’t selected for the 2022 Asian Games. (The 2022 Asian Games were eventually postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.) The SNOC said then that he had “continued to fall short” of what they expect from athletes in terms of behaviour and attitude.

In a country where citizens tend to learn from a young age that it’s unwise to challenge authority, Soh does not hold back. From 2019, he was embroiled in two defamation suits after he insisted that a fellow runner, Ashley Liew, hadn’t slowed down in a 2015 race after other competitors missed a U-turn in the race route. Liew claimed that, since he was the only runner who’d taken the turn, he’d slowed down to allow others to catch up. For this, Liew won awards for sportsmanship from both the SNOC and International Fair Play Committee. Soh, who won that race, disputed Liew’s account. Liew took him to court and won. Soh also lost his defamation suit against a former official from Singapore Athletics. He believes these disputes marked the beginning of his troubles.

SNOC has said that they don’t actively monitor the social media posts of any particular athlete, but their complaints against Soh seem remarkably granular. The week before their appeals committee met, SNOC sent Soh and Singapore Athletics thirty-six pages of problems they had with his public comments. The council did not appreciate a Facebook post in which Soh shared a news article alongside a comment about “true sportsmanship”—they claimed it was a swipe at Liew. They picked out twenty issues, including the use of strong language, with Soh’s participation in a podcast. They were upset that he’d published a photo on Instagram of himself with an OnlyFans creator who’d done time in prison for transmitting obscene material and breaching a police order, and joked in a comment about having a threesome. According to Soh, they were even unhappy about his using a laughing emoji reaction on Facebook to respond to a comment that the council felt was again in reference to Liew. Soh deleted social media posts, yet still failed to be selected.

“How did we get here, I don’t know, but certainly there is a lot of scrutiny,” Soh says. “I mean, you can’t tell me that they do this for every athlete.”

Impostor syndrome is not something Soh struggles with; he sees himself as the best long-distance runner Singapore has right now—to be fair, he has the timings to prove it—and he’s not shy about saying so. To some, that comes across as arrogance, and he’s been criticised for “not being humble”. But are swagger, snark and mildly racy jokes on social media grounds for barring an athlete from representing their country?

Singaporeans have come up with their own theories for why Soh isn’t going to Hangzhou. Some speculate that it’s because he openly supports opposition politicians. (This theory is built on the fact that the SNOC president was none other than Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan-Jin of the ruling People’s Action Party, or PAP. Former and current PAP parliamentarians are also part of the Games appeals committee.) Others believe he must have crossed senior members of the Council and that his non-selection is more about personal grudges than serious misbehaviour. After all, other athletes who’ve transgressed—including one who was fined for drink-driving—haven’t been kicked off the national team. Soh had also won a silver medal at the SEA Games in May, and widespread praise for sharing his water with an Indonesian competitor. No public scandal had erupted in the intervening months that could have explained SNOC’s decision.

Soh would “like to think that there’s no political interference in sport”. But he himself is unconvinced by SNOC’s official line. “I mean, come on, saying ‘fuck’ on a podcast, joking about having a threesome with other guys—these things cannot possibly be reasons for disqualification, right?”

As a journalist more focused on politics than sport, what happened to Soh reminded me of other instances where people ran into seemingly inexplicable barriers in their careers in Singapore. For example, in 2013, the journalism lecturer Cherian George was denied tenure for a second time at the Nanyang Technological University, forcing him to leave the university. According to academics elsewhere—including external reviewers of his tenure application—George had fulfilled all the requirements. Statements from the university administration failed to persuade observers, prompting speculation that George’s critical commentary on Singapore politics might have had something to do with the matter. George relocated to Hong Kong.

Could Soh’s exclusion from the national team point to something bigger about how things work in Singapore? It’s hard to say for sure because it’s so difficult to cut through the opacity of establishment institutions. But Soh thinks this could be a “good opportunity” to ask questions.

“In my non-selection, there are just so many avenues to it that are not sporting related,” he says. “How do we expect our athletes to behave? Is this political? Is this a societal expectation? Do we expect our national athletes to be flawless? Because we’re certainly not flawless, we’re humans like everyone else.”

The bigwigs at SNOC have shown themselves to be similarly imperfect. About two weeks after Soh and I spoke, footage emerged of Tan Chuan-Jin, in his role as Speaker, getting caught on a hot mic muttering that an opposition legislator was a “fucking populist”. Tan apologised for expressing his “private thoughts”, but did not escape public criticism. He resigned in disgrace a week later, not just for his “unparliamentary language” but also for an extramarital affair with another ruling party parliamentarian. His departure from the Singapore National Olympic Council was announced shortly after.

Soh is surprisingly candid during our interview, in stark contrast with other Singaporeans I’ve interviewed who filter their words carefully. He says he’s been advised to tone down or get his comments vetted. He considers such counsel but makes his own choices: “We all have our core values and beliefs. At the end of the day, I haven’t broken any laws, I haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t think I have gone out of my way to go and hurt people or do evil stuff.”

The leadership shake-up following Tan’s departure from SNOC has sparked hopes that the Council might reverse its decision and let Soh run in the Asian Games after all. He doesn’t want to do anything to torpedo such a possibility, and is willing to keep a lower profile until a decision is made. But during our interview, before the resignation bombshell dropped, he’d been fairly sanguine about the situation.

“You look at what’s happened in the last five years, I’ve pretty much been blacklisted indefinitely lah,” he says matter-of-factly. There’s no sign of anxiety or panic. He admits that this is easier for him to say because he’s no longer a rookie athlete. At the age of thirty-two, he’s already surpassed his childhood dream of representing Singapore at the SEA Games. He’s completing a law degree in London, with one eye on a life after running.

This doesn’t mean he’s done with races. He just doesn’t feel like he needs to prove anything to anyone at this point. “I’m less scared of what I will lose by standing for what I believe is right and my set of values,” he says. “That’s why I’m not bothering to cry, crawl back and beg for a place on the team. I’ve shown that, at this point of time, if you don’t pick me, you cannot win. So why shoot yourself in the foot just because I crack stupid jokes on social media?”

By this point in our interview, he’s done with his run and back in his flat. He starts telling me about how, if it’s clear he’ll never run for Singapore again, he might consider running for another country. Since Singapore doesn’t allow dual citizenship, this would require the drastic move of renouncing his Singapore citizenship. He says he might think about it if there’s no other option.

It’s a bold statement, but it’s undercut by the Singapore flag hanging prominently on the wall behind him. He laughs when I point it out: “At the end of the day, you know, we complain a lot about Singapore, but that’s still our home lah. So that’s of course the country that I want to represent. First priority.”

• Tags: Free to read, Issue 32, Kirsten Han, Singapore, Soh Rui Yong