Valentine’s Day: For shooter and sailor, life’s about learning

A delighted Colin Cheng shows off the roast pork belly he cooked as his wife Jasmine Ser looks on. PHOTO: COURTESY OF JASMINE SER AND COLIN CHENG

Love can be found in a W.H Auden poem, a Taylor Swift refrain and a hand held on a morning walk. Love is Notting Hill re-runs, a tragic Shakespeare play and handwritten notes in a lunch box. Love is also right here, laughing affectionately on my laptop screen on a Tuesday evening.

He, 35, the retired sailor, right now in Wagga Wagga, Australia, is pointing his finger. It’s joyously aimed at her, the shooter, 34, who’s in Singapore. They’re married, funny, nerdy – he’s a virologist studying how viruses hijack cellular processes, she’s a scholar in the art of accuracy – but they’re high-class athletes and so, even though this is a Valentine’s Day chat, I must ask.

Are you both – they play tennis and table tennis, watch cricket and the America’s Cup, ski and cycle – competitive with each other?

“Yes,” says Jasmine Ser, three-time Commonwealth Games rifle-shooting gold medallist (2010 and 2014), who competes even as she coaches.

“One of our catchphrases,” laughs Colin Cheng, Asian Games gold (2006), silver (2010) and bronze (2014) medallist, “is ‘not everything is a competition’.”

But who’s more competitive?

It’s when he points at her and she doesn’t disagree. But then she’s still an active athlete in a sport of unforgiving perfection which punishes even a quiver.

Athletes find romance in gyms, fields and equipment sheds. That’s where American thrower Harold Connolly reportedly went at the 1956 Olympics to find a hammer and instead met the Czech discus thrower Olga Fikotova. The Cold War raged, the Czech president intervened and in Prague they were married.

Wrote the New York Times then: “The H-bomb overhangs us like a cloud of doom. The subway during rush hours is almost impossible to endure. But Olga and Harold are in love, and the world does not say no to them.”

The first time Cheng saw Ser was slightly less romantic. It was on a piece of paper. “I’m a nerd,” he explains, “so I like to look things up.” Like reading the profiles in the Team Singapore booklet at the 2006 Asian Games. And there she was.

In 2012 they met. Friendship bloomed. He found her “bubbly, very curious and passionate”; she loved his intellect and how he expanded her knowledge of the world. Love was built, piece by piece. After dinner, even at a cafe, a board would appear and chess was played.

He writes her postcards and teaches her to ski. She fine-tunes his cooking. “Siu yuk (roast pork belly),” Cheng says proudly.

Yes, but any good?

“Not that bad,” she laughs.

Shooter Jasmine Ser and sailor Colin Cheng at the 2012 Singapore Grand Prix. PHOTO: COURTESY OF JASMINE SER AND COLIN CHENG

Sport isn’t only a profession, it’s a language which ties a tribe. Musicians would understand. In studios, they speak of chords, harmonies, bridges, choruses. In arenas, they talk pressure, rankings, challenge, ambition. It’s a foreign land of early morning shifts and endless labour which builds exhaustion but also affinity.

Away from the cameras, athletes can pull off masks with each other and strip away pretence. Only they see clearly the ache of vulnerability. At the 2004 Olympics, as the great shooter Matthew Emmons mourned his error in the 50m rifle three-positions final – a shot at the wrong target cost him gold – the Czech shooter Katerina Kurkova appeared. She offered sympathy and a four-leaf clover keychain. Soon they were married.

Romance is not restricted to the same sport, for fencers romance swimmers and handballers marry hockey players. This language hurdles any type of border and every possible category. Tara Davis-Woodhall is married to Hunter Woodhall and both are 2024 gold medallists: She in the Olympic long jump, he in the Paralympic 400m T62 category.

Sport binds Ser and Cheng, too, for they appreciate their separate labours and the varying mysteries attached to their crafts. Sailing, Cheng says, is rife with variables (the water moody, the wind unruly, rivals who can’t be controlled) but shooting has an unmoving intensity. “I think,” he says of shooting, “it’s very pure, you and you alone determine your fate.”

Cheng shows his wife what life on the water is like. PHOTO: COURTESY OF JASMINE SER AND COLIN CHENG

Then, teasingly, I ask, whose sport is harder.

“His,” she says.

“Hers,” he says.

Ser has been sailing and speaks of it with a novice’s wonder. “Because of him I can now read the waves.” Cheng, who is waiting for his shot at a range, is nevertheless well versed in rifle’s standing, prone and kneeling positions. “He never gets tired of listening,” she says. “I feel like I have another coach who gives me good advice.” High performance is their shared dialect.

“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time,” wrote Jane Austen. For these two it feels like a gentle, kind, inquisitiveness. Athletes, at their restless core, are explorers, travelling through unfamiliar terrain to find their purest selves. It’s the adventure which beckons, like the day Cheng told Ser they were going to make something.

“I thought,” she says, “he was going to bring me to a bread-making workshop?”

Instead they went to a shop where they measured, shaped, soldered, sanded and hammered metal to make something lasting for themselves.

I ask what and they both show me their fingers.

“I made his ring,” she says. “He made my ring.”

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