Ho (second right, standing), Ng (right) and the athletes posing with (from left) Sarawak State Sports Council coordinator for wushu Thomas Chia, Allen Wong and James Ting.
KUCHING: Six wushu exponents, four from Selangor and two from Terengganu Sukma teams, are in town for a three-day training stint with the Sarawak Sukma XVIII team.
Leading the group is Selangor head coach Ho Ro Bin and the six athletes are all training under the Ho Ro Bin Wushu Training Centre.
They arrived on Wednesday and immediately settled down to train alongside the state wushu athletes at the Elite Training Centre at Kota Sentosa Sports Centre.
The team comprising Fong Kah Chun, Fu Fang Zyun, Lau Jun Huang, Lee Ming Yi, Wan Nur Aiman and Cebelle Mandy Chen, accompanied by assistant coach Ng Khang Ching, will fly back to Selangor today.
“This is part of our preparations for the challenge in Sukma XVIII this July,” said Ho after a welcoming lunch hosted by Wushu Federation of Sarawak (WFS) president Allen Wong Siew Poh at a hotel yesterday.
“Our main objective of coming here to train is to share the experience and knowledge with our Sarawak counterparts. Others are to enhance Selangor ties with Sarawak (WFS), to check on the competition venue and the conditions here as Sarawak will be hosting Sukma XVIII from July 22-31,” said the former World Wushu Championships, SEA Games and Asia Games gold medallist.
Ho said Sarawak was chosen as the venue of the team’s training stint because it had a solid, systematic and professional development programme.
Furthermore, Sarawak is a wushu powerhouse in the country and has produced numerous athletes for the national team.
“We have also been to Kedah and Pahang for similar training experience,” he added.
Ho revealed that Selangor are targeting to win a gold medal in the coming Sukma to better the one silver and one bronze medals won at Perlis Sukma two years ago.
According to him, that was the best results that Selangor achieved in three editions of Sukma (Perlis, Pahang, Malacca) when he led the team as head coach.
Meanwhile, WFS deputy president James Ting said this was not the first time that wushu teams from West Malaysia come to train in Sarawak.
“Teams from Kuala Lumpur came a couple of times and even the national team came to train here for three times,” he recalled.
Ting said the exchange and sharing of experience and knowledge between the two states was beneficial to both parties.