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Veronica Shanti Pereira is 18 years old when her two older sisters decide to write a book about her. They are standing in the bleachers at the National Stadium in Singapore, watching their youngest sister compete in the 200m sprint at the 2015 SEA Games.
As Pereira blazes down the track, her sisters feel their hearts thumping in their chests, blood rushing in their ears.
She crosses the finish line first. The crowd roars around them. The two older girls know: their baby sister has just made history.
“They were really moved by the impact of that moment,” says Pereira, reflecting on a conversation she had with her sisters in Bali, on a trip they took a month after that fateful race. “They felt like they had to put that experience down somewhere to remember forever.”
Pereira’s 2015 win made her something of a national hero—after all, she had just earned Singapore its first gold medal in the event in 42 years. With the new national record came its requisite glory. Pereira was awarded the Sports Excellence Scholarship in 2016. A year later, she added another feather to her cap: the Yip Pin Xiu Scholarship to study accountancy at Singapore Management University (SMU).
Titled Go Shanti Go, the children’s book her sisters would eventually go on to write charted Pereira’s journey as an athlete from when she was a child all the way to her historic win in 2015. What her sisters couldn’t have known, however, was the setback that lay just ahead.
In 2018 came a crushing injury. Pereira recalls the moment she got hurt during training with excruciating clarity, describing it as an “out-of-body experience”. A grade two hamstring injury meant that her muscle had partially torn, resulting in acute pain and loss of strength in her leg.
The days that followed were a blur. “I was in so much pain that it was difficult for me to fall asleep,” she says. “Emotionally, I was lost. It was the strangest feeling to suddenly not be able to do things that were second nature to me.
“All I could think about was getting back on the track, picking up where I had left off. But I couldn’t train the way I needed to without injuring myself again. It was incredibly difficult to come to terms with the fact that my body needed time to heal from a trauma.”
Pereira’s goal of medalling at the 2018 Asian Games was over. The physical blow of her injury was followed by another difficult consequence: Pereira’s inability to perform at the 2018 Asian Games meant that she would be stripped of her Sports Excellence Scholarship. Then came a painful double whammy—having struggled with her mental health and unable to keep her grades up, she also lost her academic scholarship from SMU.
Thinking back to the agonising few weeks when all this transpired, Pereira says: “I hadn’t had the time to process the first loss before the second happened and the wind was knocked out of me. I didn’t know if I had a career anymore.”
It is October 2023 when Pereira becomes her country’s first Asian Games athletics champion since 1974.
This came months after she qualified for the Olympics on merit, for an event (the 200m sprint—Pereira’s forte) that, as per her coach, had been one of the hardest to qualify for in history. Three years ago, at the Tokyo Olympics, the qualifying time had been 22.80 seconds. This year, the standard to meet was 22.57.
Those 23 milliseconds might not seem like much, but in the track and field world, they represent a huge gulf. Pereira crossed that gulf alongside the finish line when she set a new national record of 22.57 seconds at the World Championships 200m semifinal, making her the first Singaporean to progress past the heats at the World Championships.
She now holds the national record in all four sprint categories and is the fastest Southeast Asian woman in the 100m and 200m events.
Pereira is 28 years old this year—a far cry from the shy 18-year-old who had shown such incredible promise on the track that had inspired her sisters to write a book about her—but she beams widely when she reveals that the support from her family has been unwavering. “My mum, dad and siblings are the most amazing people I know. Throughout my ups and downs, they gave me all the space I needed but were there for me unconditionally. Anytime I wanted to talk to someone, or just cry, I always had them to rely on. They are the ones who keep me grounded through it all.”
“Each day, I have something small that I’m trying to work on—whether that’s perfecting a certain running mechanic or strengthening my competition mindset”
Between a blistering training schedule and a dedicated mental health regime to keep her head in the game, other things that keep Pereira grounded are spending time with her friends, partner (“I’m looking forward to spending more quality time with him after the Olympics; maybe we’ll go on holiday!” she says with a grin) and shopping trips to Sephora. Cooking, an unexpected hobby she picked up as a by-product of trying to keep her nutrition tip-top, has also become a way for her to show love to the people around her.
“I feel like an imposter saying I cook because the meals I make are super easy—like a zucchini lasagne. Still, it’s a lovely feeling when people eat the food I make and enjoy it. Or, at least, I think they do,” she laughs.
Beyond these moments of joy, Pereira’s focus is definitely razor-sharp.
“As athletes, the reality is that you are ultimately driven by a certain desired outcome. That can get overwhelming; you have this big thing that you want, but what can you do each day to get there?”
Pereira reflects on her positive working relationship with her coach, Luis Canha, who understands her innately. “He realised that I was very outcome-oriented, which wasn’t great for my mental health. He has helped me to instead work on embracing the process for what it is. This means that every day, I have something small that I’m trying to work on—whether it’s perfecting a certain running mechanic or strengthening my competition mindset. It gives me a manageable goal that I can accomplish and is way less overwhelming.”
Keeping her eye on the journey over the result has never been more important than in this moment, with Pereira’s star rising and public anticipation around her building to an all-time high. “It gets harder to resist expectations as you progress further. When I won the Asian championships in July, people started to predict that I might win the Asian Games later that year. Now that I’ve qualified for Paris, the reaction I’m seeing is that some Singaporeans are expecting me to get a gold medal at the Olympics.”
Pereira pauses to chuckle and shrug. “I have to bring them down to Earth occasionally with a reminder that some of my competitors are the best in the world—they are running a full second faster than me. In track and field terms, that’s a lot. It’s not about me not dreaming big enough, it’s just the reality of the situation.”
She attributes this to a general lack of understanding about the field of athletics, but I sense a deeper sentiment—one that tends to rear its head whenever we have national conversations about sport and one that reflects the exacting way in which we treat our athletes. Can’t it be good enough that Pereira qualified and is the first Singaporean to have done so in years? Isn’t her inspiring journey, through all of its ups and downs, worth celebrating on its own?
“It’s funny you say that,” she says, pensively. “It reminds me of the reaction people had to my performance at the Asian Games last year. I got a silver in the 100m and a gold in the 200m. I got so many comments about how I narrowly missed the double gold. I know they’re trying to be encouraging, but I wish I could tell them, how about we still celebrate the silver?”
And not for nothing, given that the silver in question was the first Asian Games medal the Singapore women’s athletics scene had seen in nearly 50 years.
“We need to create a safe space for our athletes so they can go out there and give it their all without being crippled by the fear that they might not get a medal”
She shares her candid thoughts on what could create a better sporting culture in Singapore—one that is able to support its athletes through the ups and downs that they are bound to face, instead of cutting them down the minute they seem to fail.
“It might sound ironic that I’m saying this at this stage of the season, but I think it would be helpful to stop focusing so intensely on medals. We need to create a safe space for our athletes so they can go out there and give it their all without being crippled by the fear that they might not get a medal.”
She takes a deep breath, like she’s thought about this a thousand times. “In reality, a medal just isn’t possible sometimes. What we need to understand is that anything less than a medal isn’t automatically a loss. It depends on each athlete’s goals and the journey they are on—it could still be good enough and it could still be worth celebrating.”
Photography Sayher Heffernan
Producer David Bay
Styling Jasmine Ashvinkumar
Hair Dollei Seah/Makeup Entourage using Keune Haircosmetics
Make-up Lydia Thong/Makeup Entourage using Make Up Forever
The June ‘Impact’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available online and in-store.
