Swimmer Schooling seeks national service delay after Olympics moved

Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps

Joseph Schooling, the Olympic swimming champion is looking for a delay for his national service in Singapore

So, he can get his competition in the Tokyo Games that got postponed lately, officials declared Wednesday.

The city-state needs all 18-year-old males to serve for 2 years in the police, the military, or the emergency services, it’s very rare that authorities would let people skip this service.

However, Schooling was permitted to delay national service in 2014 to prepare for the 2016 Rio Olympics, where he broadly beat his golden calf Michael Phelps to win the 100-meter butterfly gold.

He got another postponement to prepare for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, yet the Games were moved to one year from now due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Singapore’s resistance service said Schooling and another Tokyo-bound Singapore swimmer, Quah Zheng Wen, have applied to another defer their national service to participate in the Olympics.

The ministry stated it would look at “details of their training plans and milestones” before settling on a decision.

Schooling faces an extreme fight to repeat his 2016 achievement – he was condemned for being in a bad way finally year’s Southeast Asian Games in the Philippines, where he won just an individual gold medal.

In 2018, the defense ministry declined an application by Singaporean football player Ben Davis to postpone his national service so he could play in the English Premier League, saying he didn’t meet the rules.

Davis marked an arrangement with Premier League side Fulham in any case, and could now confront prison for missing his national service on the off chance that he comes back to Singapore.

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