Brooke Chong-Ash­ing of T&T com­pet­ed in the Laser 4.7 cat­e­go­ry in the 47th Sin­ga­pore In­ter­na­tion­al Laser Class Open Cham­pi­onship held De­cem­ber 7-8,2024. This was the 16-year-old’s first in­ter­na­tion­al Laser com­pe­ti­tion.

Chong-Ash­ing was pro­vid­ed re­mote sup­port from T&T via Kristof Stüven, Cer­ti­fied Lev­el 1 World Sail­ing coach, to pre­pare for her race, de­spite the chal­lenge of a 12-hour time dif­fer­ence be­tween this coun­try and Sin­ga­pore.

Al­though, she did not place among the top fin­ish­ers in the event which saw 47 sailors com­pete over two days, the teenag­er in­tends to con­tin­ue her land fit­ness train­ing with Stüven while she is in T&T over her school’s Christ­mas break. She has iden­ti­fied at least four more IL­CA com­pet­i­tive events in Sin­ga­pore dur­ing the first half of 2025 and tar­get­ed im­prove­ments for these next com­pe­ti­tions.

A for­mer stu­dent of St Joseph’s Con­vent Port-of-Spain, she is cur­rent­ly a Grade 11 stu­dent at Unit­ed World Col­lege (UWC) South East Asia (Dover cam­pus) as the re­cip­i­ent of a par­tial UWC schol­ar­ship fa­cil­i­tat­ed through the UWC T&T Na­tion­al Com­mit­tee.

“I’m in­cred­i­bly grate­ful to the UWC TT Na­tion­al Com­mit­tee for the op­por­tu­ni­ty of a life­time to at­tend UWC in Sin­ga­pore and to UWC SEA for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to sail in Sin­ga­pore,” said Chong-Ash­ing, who is part of the UWC SEA school sail­ing team and has tak­en the ini­tia­tive to par­tic­i­pate in sail­ing events in Sin­ga­pore on an in­di­vid­ual lev­el.

Chong-Ash­ing start­ed recre­ation­al sail­ing at age sev­en to­geth­er with her old­er broth­er Luke and has trained at both Ch­aguara­mas and Ves­signy lo­ca­tions and in Mi­a­mi. She com­pet­ed in lo­cal re­gat­tas in Op­ti­mist, 420 and Laser class­es and in yacht races as a ju­nior skip­per.

She is ex­cit­ed about com­pet­ing in Sin­ga­pore and rep­re­sent­ing T&T at in­ter­na­tion­al re­gat­tas and in the fu­ture, ob­tain her coach­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tions. Her broth­er, Luke, rep­re­sent­ed T&T at Op­ti­mist Worlds in 2019 and was a youth nom­i­nee for sail­ing for the FCB Foun­da­tion Youth Sports Awards in 2020.

In­spired by T&T’s Olympic sailor An­drew Lewis, Chong-Ash­ing con­tin­ues to be part of an ac­tive com­mu­ni­ty of sailors who are mo­ti­vat­ed and com­mit­ted to giv­ing back to T&T through teach­ing sail­ing at camps and on week­ends and plans to con­tin­ue her in­volve­ment and shar­ing her en­thu­si­asm for the sport of sail­ing dur­ing school hol­i­days in Ju­ly. Chong-Ash­ing is of the view that sail­ing teach­es valu­able life lessons and builds con­fi­dence in a way that no oth­er sport can.

While in Sin­ga­pore, she hopes to meet Max Maed­er, the Sin­ga­pore sail­ing bronze Paris Olympics medal­list and dou­ble world cham­pi­on kite­foil­er.