- The St Paul’s Secondary School graduate and former ‘South China Morning Post’ Student of the Year struggled to balance sports and her studies, but her hard work paid off
- Haughey and fencer Edgar Cheung Ka-long have each won a medal for Hong Kong at this year’s Games
Siobhan Haughey holds up her silver medal at the awards ceremony after the Women's 200m Freestyle Final at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Photo: DPASiobhan Haughey’s journey to the Tokyo Olympics medal podium is the result of years of endless training and sacrifice as she juggled swimming and her studies.
Haughey, the 23-year-old Hong Kong star swimmer who took silver in the 200m freestyle on Wednesday, was born in Hong Kong in October 1997 – two months after the city’s handover from British to Chinese rule – to Irish father Darach and Hong Kong mother Canjo. She has an older sister, Aisling.
Siobhan Haughey and her older sister Aisling as kids.
She took her first swimming class at the South China Athletic Association at the age of four, shortly after she began kindergarten.
“I didn’t enjoy it at all. I thought it was very boring ... and I would cry every time I went,” she said. “But when I started beating the guys in practice, that’s when I thought, ‘I might be good at this’.”
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Her parents wanted her to know how to swim, believing that it was a survival skill. She even started training on a swimming team at the age of six. But she just did not like it.
“When I was in Primary Six, I told [my parents] that I didn’t like swimming. But my mother said that I could only stop when I was in Form One,” she told the Chinese-language Ming Pao newspaper in 2015.
She looked forward to the day she could finally kiss swimming goodbye. But then something unexpected happened: she started getting better at the sport and realised that she had fallen in love with it.
She studied at St Paul’s Primary Catholic School and St Paul’s Secondary School. When she was only 16, she was named South China Morning Post’s Student of the Year Sportsperson for 2013, following her gold medal win at the Fina World Junior Swimming Championships in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. There, she also won silver in the 50m freestyle.
Juggling swimming practice and her studies was no easy task, as she had to practise six days a week in her final years of secondary school. While she was preparing for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) Examination, she even had to wake up in the early hours of the morning to revise before heading to swimming practice at 5am, and then going to school.
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“Balancing both school and training can be hard,” she told Young Post in 2016. “There were countless days when I had to wake up at 3am to study.”
Her hard work paid off on the DSE exam: She scored 5** in liberal studies; 5* in English; 5 in accounting and Maths; 4 in Chinese, Chemistry and English literature. 5** is the top score.
She enrolled at the University of Michigan to study psychology in 2016. That same year, she competed in the Olympics for the first time, heading to Rio de Janeiro, where she made history as the first female swimmer from Hong Kong to enter an Olympic semi-final. She finished 13th overall.
Haughey poses with her two gold medals from the World University Games. Photo: SCMP / Dickson Lee
The next year, she proved her skills to the world by winning two gold medals at the 2017 World University Games for the 100m and 200m freestyle events.
Fast forward to the Tokyo Olympics, when she made it to the 200m freestyle finals and finished second. The next day, she lived up to Hong Kong’s expectations and won silver.
The swimmer clocked 1:53.92, while Australia’s Ariarne Titmus took gold, clocking 1:53.50 and breaking the Olympic record. Canada’s Penny Oleksiak won bronze with 1:54.70.
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Earlier in the week, Hong Kong fencer Edgar Cheung Ka-long took gold in the individual foil, raising hopes of a second medal from the Hong Kong Olympic delegation.
Speaking after receiving the “heavy” silver medal, Haughey said her mind was “blank” at the medal podium.
Hong Kong's Siobhan Haughey (from left) Australia's Ariarne Titmus and Canada's Penny Oleksiak leave after collecting their medals. Photo: AFP
“I have finally achieved my goal,” she said. “This time at the Olympics, I had this feeling that I belonged here. I was no longer frightened when I was waiting in the call room. I was still a bit frightened, but I was more excited than that.”
“I was excited that I could compete with the best swimmers in the world and that I was considered one of the top swimmers.”