PUBLISHED ONAugust 24, 2023 11:10 AMByDrima ChakrabortyShanti Pereira's on a roll.
The local track-and-field athlete set the national record for the 100m category back in July at 11.20 seconds, beating the previous record — also set by her — by 0.06 seconds.
She also holds the national, SEA Games and Asian Athletics Championships record for the 200m.
The 26-year-old is currently in Budapest, Hungary, for the World Athletics Championships from Aug 19 to 27, becoming the first Singaporean to qualify on merit since at least 2011.
[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/CwSkFBhq9a9[/embed]
But the road hasn't always been easy for Shanti, as she revealed on the podcast R U Okay? with radio DJ Jean Danker recently.
In the video uploaded on Wednesday (Aug 23) on YouTube, Shanti said: "From 2018 to early 2022, it was a really hard time for me."
She explained that she had been on the Sport Excellence Scholarship since 2016 and had set a goal for herself to earn a medal at the Asian Games in 2018, but got "pretty badly injured" at the start of the year.
Suffering from a grade two hamstring strain, Shanti was out of action for a month, unable to undergo intense training.
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"That already puts a huge hole into my progress, right? But then, when I got back onto the track and sprinted, I injured it again," she revealed with a sad smile.
"The minute it happened — it was during training — I was just like, 'Nah, it's not gonna happen for me this year'."
With less that two months to the Asian Games, Shanti didn't have enough time to get back into peak performance, and it resulted in "horrible performances" far from her best.
"Because I didn't hit my goal, I lost the scholarship, so it was just a very painful time for me," she explained.
Shanti revealed that she went for a review session with the sports scholarship administrators to discuss her progress and had to return two weeks later to receive the news that she had lost it.
"Right after, I went to my car and just bawled my eyes out," she added. "I had to run from the room because tears were coming out already."
At the time, she was studying accountancy at the Singapore Management University (SMU) under the Yip Pin Xiu scholarship.
After losing her sports scholarship, Shanti was holidaying in Bali with her friends when their university semester results were released. She then discovered that she had fallen short of the minimum GPA requirement — leading her to lose her second scholarship within a week.
"I had to go see the Dean of Student Affairs — or something like that — with my parents, and that's when they broke the news to me," she said.
Again, Shanti could only go back to the car with her parents and cry.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMqClyN2iC8&ab_channel=Entertainment-Mediacorp[/embed]
Things have since looked up for Shanti, who graduated from SMU in 2021 and is back on the sports scholarship.
Saying that she has been "embracing every single opportunity that has come [her] way this year", Shanti added: "When I think of everything that has happened, it was awful but all of it has contributed to the experiences that I've picked up over the years.
"As bad as it was, I don't regret it."
Jean, 44, quipped: "Are you saying you would experience it all over again?"
That resulted in an immediate "of course not" from Shanti.
"But at least now I know better how to deal with things," she concluded.
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drimac@asiaone.com
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