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BANGKOK <\/span>\u2013 In an alternate universe, Olympic medallist Kayla Sanchez would be blitzing the pool for Singapore instead of the Philippines at the ongoing SEA Games. <\/p>\n With a bright smile and a laugh, the 24-year-old SEA Games debutante told The Straits Times: \u201cMy parents (Filipinos Noel Sanchez and Susana Pramoso) met in Malaysia, then they went to Singapore to work. So I was born there. <\/p>\n \u201cBut I was three years old when my parents moved to Canada, so I don\u2019t remember much about Singapore, which I visited for the first time last year after the Paris Olympics.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The following year, the Filipino-Canadian set a world junior short-course record in the girls\u2019 100m freestyle with a time of 51.45sec at the Swim England Winter Championships.<\/p>\n At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she bagged a women\u2019s 4x100m freestyle silver and 4x100m medley bronze, and also has a clutch of relay medals from the world championships in 2019 and 2022.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sanchez said: \u201cAfter achieving those medals with Canada, it was a hard decision. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n While her outing in Paris was average by her high standards \u2013 she set a women\u2019s 100m freestyle national record in 53.67sec in the heats and finished 15th in the semi-finals in 54.21sec, well short of her personal best of 53.12sec \u2013 she has been labelled a \u201cgame-changer\u201d at the Thailand Games because of her pedigree.<\/p>\n Despite being literally miles away from world-class facilities and competing against rivals who were weaker than those she used to face in Canada, Sanchez has taken to the regional meet like, well, fish to water with her bubbly persona and even lost her voice from cheering on her new national teammates.<\/p>\n In her first SEA Games event on Dec 10, she <\/p>\n anchored the Philippines to a historic women\u2019s 4x100m freestyle gold<\/p>\n <\/a>, and beating Singapore, who had not lost since 2015, in the process.<\/p>\n Registered for nine events, she followed up with a <\/p>\n women\u2019s 50m backstroke Games record of 28.47 in the heats<\/p>\n