Joseph Schooling pulled off a stunning Olympic upset on Friday by beating US legend Michael Phelps in the 100m butterfly to win Singapore’s first ever gold medal.
Asian champion Schooling, 21, completed a wire-to-wire victory to deny Phelps a fourth successive title in the event, winning in a Games record 50.39sec. Phelps, amazingly, tied with both Chad le Clos and Laszlo Cseh for the silver.
Here, we pick out five things you didn’t know about Schooling.
1. Singapore had never won an Olympic gold before Schooling’s breakthrough. The country first entered the Olympics in 1948. Singapore’s first medal was a silver in weightlifting at Rome in 1960. Singapore waited 28 years before winning its next medal, a silver in table tennis at Beijing in 2008. In London, Singapore won two bronze medals in table tennis.
2. Joseph Schooling met Michael Phelps by chance when he was 13 and had his photograph taken with him. Phelps was in Singapore preparing for the Beijing Olympics and was training at one of the pools where Schooling also practiced. Schooling said Phelps was his idol growing up but had no regrets about beating him in his final race.
3. To further his swimming career, Schooling left Singapore when he was 13 and moved to Florida to train at the Bolles School, living in a boarding house with older boys. He regularly fought with his coach Sergio Lopez, the Spaniard who won a bronze medal in breaststroke at the 1998 Olympics, but credits him for his success.
4. It is mandatory for Singaporean men to perform two years of National Service after finishing school. Schooling competed at the 2012 London Olympics, and a year later the government agreed to defer his enlistment for three years to let him continue training in the United States for the Rio Olympics.
5. Schooling bears a tattoo on his back, depicting the head and horns of a Longhorn, a breed of Texas cattle, and the emblem of sporting teams at the University of Texas, where he studies and trains. Underneath the cattle horns are the words, “Come and Take It.” Schooling had to convince his parents before they allowed him to get the tattoo.
