Long jumper Tiffany Yue on how her Asian Games success boosted her ambition and body confidence

The 25-year-old was spotted by a track and field coach when she was just five; she was a member of her schools’ athletics teams since primary school, participating in all kinds of track and field contests, especially sprinting, in interschool competitions. “I really like speed—that’s why I started off as a sprinter,” she says.

But her path to becoming a pro sportswoman hasn’t been what you might expect. “It’s quite a funny story. [At primary school,] we could only choose one extracurricular activity; for me, it was between athletics and choir. A senior schoolmate told me that I’d have to practise carol singing during the Christmas break [if I chose choir], so I picked track and field because I wanted my holiday.”

There wouldn’t be any time for holidays once she started secondary school. “I didn’t get any public holidays any more: they became either training days,” or she would have to spend them on other aspects of her training. Then, by the time she turned 18, her public examinations, the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education, were imminent. These added to the pressure she had been experiencing at having “zero progress for all my track and field performances, [starting] from when I was in Secondary Five. I was struggling with 100m [which I specialised in], 100m hurdles and long jump. I thought maybe I had reached my full potential.”

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Just as she was seriously considering quitting, she achieved a new personal best in long jump on her last secondary school sports day, jumping 5.93m. The Hong Kong junior record was 6.00m; the Hong Kong senior record was 6.06m. I thought, ‘I achieved this without specialised training. What if I specialise in it; then I surely will break the record, right? I was only 14cm away from the Hong Kong record. So I decided to take up long jump and see how far I can go,” she says. “[Besides,] for long jump, you get three chances in competitions, whereas you only get one shot with sprinting.”

Yue started her long jump training in 2014 under her coach Anny Chan; four years later, she was admitted to the Hong Kong Sports Institute, where she continued to train under Chan until 2022, when Rolf Ohman took over for a year; Chan would return as her consultant last year. Her day is typically made up of one three-to-four-hour training or gym session, followed by physiotherapy. “Because long jump athletes are always training at high intensity when compared to distance runners, who focus on their endurance, we get a lot more rest than you may imagine,” she says. “Everything that we do involves [pressure] on our joints, so we can’t have more than one training session per day. That [increases the] risk of injuries.”

Under their guidance, Yue has been putting on compelling performances at the sand pit: her first glory came in 2019, when she won bronze in the Asian Championships, which earned her a ticket to the Asian Games last year, where her record-breaking achievement made headlines.

When Yue became a full-time athlete five years ago, she never imagined she would have the ambition and competitiveness she demonstrates today. Her success has also boosted her confidence about her own body image. “When I was in secondary school, I overheard [gossip among other students] about my thighs being a bit too thick,” she says. “It’s true my thighs are bigger than those who aren’t athletes or who don’t exercise a lot, but I buy regular jeans. It’s weird that they were commenting on mine and not their own. I wasn’t big; they were too skinny.”

Yue hopes that athletes like her can help to lead the charge in changing the fashion industry, which, for a long time, has been encouraging unhealthy and misleading ideals when it comes to body image. “I really hope brands can use athletes or more muscular girls as their models so that people can see what a healthy body should look like instead of [presenting] chopstick legs,” she says. “After all, clothes aren’t only designed for models, but also [people with average body types] to wear. Fashion should bring out the beauty in them: instead of asking a specific body type to fit [a garment], the garment should accommodate what the wearer needs. The fashion industry can use models of different sizes and shapes to show how their clothes can fit everyone. I hope to see more female athletes getting involved in the fashion industry, to show younger girls that being muscular is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”

Fashion will have to wait for now: Yue is currently training for the Paris Olympics. “The golden age for women in long jumping is somewhere between 25 and 35,” she says. “Usually, we aim for every Olympic year and see it as a checkpoint; I imagine I’ll be jumping until 2028. Then we’ll see how things go.”

And while a side gig in fashion is not out of the question, when the time comes, Yue doesn’t plan on continuing along the usual retired athlete path into elite coaching. “I don’t really have the eyes of a coach to tell if an athlete is tired or upset,” she says; mental state affects training and competing, so a coach needs to be able to assess their athletes’ mood. “Even with all the technological aids, there is a lot that you can’t see from a video playback.” Instead, she is looking to become a dietitian with her studies in nutrition at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The effervescent athlete takes a sip of her iced latte, stretches and prepares to show us her coolest jumps in the studio, which has been transformed into a sandpit for the photo shoot. With a powerful thrust, she springs like a leaping jaguar—ready for both a breathtaking photo and a promising future.

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