BANGKOK – In an alternate universe, Olympic medallist Kayla Sanchez would be blitzing the pool for Singapore instead of the Philippines at the ongoing SEA Games.
With a bright smile and a laugh, the 24-year-old SEA Games debutante told The Straits Times: “My parents (Filipinos Noel Sanchez and Susana Pramoso) met in Malaysia, then they went to Singapore to work. So I was born there.
“But I was three years old when my parents moved to Canada, so I don’t remember much about Singapore, which I visited for the first time last year after the Paris Olympics.”
It was in Toronto where Sanchez grew up in a Tagalog-speaking family and learnt to swim, before she began competitive swimming at age eight, worked her way up the Ontario high-performance centre and joined the Canada national team at 16 in 2017.
The following year, the Filipino-Canadian set a world junior short-course record in the girls’ 100m freestyle with a time of 51.45sec at the Swim England Winter Championships.
At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she bagged a women’s 4x100m freestyle silver and 4x100m medley bronze, and also has a clutch of relay medals from the world championships in 2019 and 2022.
In 2023, she made waves by switching sporting nationality from Canada to the Philippines, paving the way for her to represent her adopted country at the Paris Olympics in 2024.
Sanchez said: “After achieving those medals with Canada, it was a hard decision. I’ve always been really proud of my Filipino heritage. My parents are from the Philippines and they were talking about the SEA Games and me representing the Philippines.
“I had done my work for Canada, who introduced me to high-performance sport, and I wanted to bring that to the Philippines and inspire the young Filipino swimmers.”
