SINGAPORE — He may have been the only Singaporean to have won a medal at the Arena Pro Swim Series in Austin, but national swimmer Quah Zheng Wen did not sound all too excited when talking about his achievement.

While the 19-year-old managed to overcome stern competition — including Swedish Olympian Simon Sjodin, and Olympic champion (200m backstroke) Tyler Clary — to win gold in the 200m butterfly, his time of 1:58:07 still fell short of his personal best of 1:56:26.

Quah, who has already met the Rio Olympics “A” qualifying mark for the 100m and 200m butterfly, and 100m backstroke, eventually finished ahead of Sjodin (1:58:27) and Ukraine’s Andre Seliskar (1:58:47), who took the silver and bronze respectively.

“It was a good experience because I learnt to race under pressure against some of the top swimmers in the world,” said Quah. “But I’m not too happy with the timing because I definitely could have gone a lot faster.”

Reflecting on his experience over the three-day event, the former Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) student added that competing in such overseas competitions on a regular basis would see him “improve mentally and help him reach the next level of swimming.”

Quah was one of 10 local swimmers who travelled to the US for a month-long training camp with national head coach Sergio Lopez.

Lopez insists he has been impressed with his charges during the trip, and is optimistic that a number of them could follow Quah’s and Joseph Schooling’s footsteps in meeting the Olympics’ “A” mark.

The next opportunity for the swimmers to qualify for the Olympics will come at the Singapore National Age-Group Championships from Mar 16-20.

“They’ve done a very good job over the three weeks we’ve been together,” said Lopez. “They’ve also impressed a lot of people during this meet with not only their abilities, but also their attitudes. The next nine weeks will be crucial for them. They will need to improve on their power especially, but they have been training very hard and I believe they can improve their timings.” NOAH TAN

CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this story, we reported that the winning time set by Quah Zheng Wen was 1hr 58min 7sec and his personal best was 1hr 56min 26s. These timings were wrong. Quah’s winning set was 1min 58.07sec and his personal best is 1min 56.26sec.
It was also reported that Simon Sjodin and Andre Seliskar's times were 1hr 58min 27sec and 1hr 58min 47sec respectively. They should be 1min 58.27sec and 1min 58.47sec. We are sorry for the errors.