From Siobhán Haughey to Ng On-yee, here are 8 women ruling sports in Hong Kong and beyond

With a total of three bronze medals at the 2012 and 2020 Olympics (in Atlanta and Tokyo respectively), track cyclist Sarah Lee Wai-sze is the first and only Hong Kong athlete to have been decorated at two different Olympic Games. This also makes her the athlete with the most Olympic medals in the city. She is also the first female cyclist to win the women’s 500m time-trial at the UCI World Track Championships in 2013 in Belarus, and became the first female and third overall athlete from Hong Kong to wear the rainbow jersey, which is awarded to all those who win this championship.

Powerhouse performer Siobhán Haughey became a household name in Hong Kong when the swimming superstar won her first silver medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the 200m freestyle event, which was also Hong Kong’s first medal in Olympic swimming. And when she won her second silver medal in the 100m freestyle event two days later, she became one of the city’s most decorated Olympians. That same year, Haughey also set a world record at the Fina World Swimming Championships in the 200m freestyle category. Beyond swimming, the 25-year-old athlete and former University of Michigan student has also launched her own swimwear line with Arena sports brand.

Read more: Tatler Talks To Siobhan Haughey, Hong Kong’s Prized Olympic Swimmer

Karateka Grace Lau has represented Hong Kong in international competitions since she was 16 years old. She specialises in “individual kata”, which involves detailed choreographed patterns of martial arts movements. Among the numerous prizes and medals she has won over the past decade, a major highlight is her bronze medal win at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. With this triumph, she became the first karateka to win an Olympic medal for the city. 

Born in 1994, Vivian Kong is a Hong Kong left-handed épée fencer, two-time individual Asian champion and two-time Olympian. In 2019, she became the first fencer from Hong Kong to win a World Cup title at the FIE Fencing World Cup in Cuba. She also picked up a bronze medal in the women’s épée category at the 2022 World Fencing Championships in Egypt.

Ng On-yee is Hong Kong’s most decorated woman snooker player. The athlete, who grew up in Sham Shui Po, became the first Asian winner of the Women’s World Snooker Championship in 2018, a bumper year in which she also won the Australian Women’s Snooker Open and the UK Women’s Snooker Championship. And she held the number one position in the World Women’s Snooker world ranking list from February 2018 to April 2019. After a slow 2020 due to the pandemic, Ng again dominated in tournaments in 2021—such as the Belgium Open and the Hong Kong Women’s Open.

Hong Kong wheelchair fencer Alison Yu Chui-yee suffered from bone cancer at the age of 11, which led to the amputation of her left leg. To speed up recovery, she started to swim and finally, with the encouragement of her friends, she started wheelchair fencing. Since then, she has represented Hong Kong in the Paralympics since 2004 and boasts seven Paralympic gold medals to her name, and is preparing hard for the 2024 Paris Paralympics.

Ada Tsang may not be an athlete by profession: she is actually a middle school teacher, but she is an athlete, and an endurance athlete, nonetheless. Some time ago, she had promised her students she would climb Mount Everest as a way of motivating them to work hard and pursue their dreams. So, in 2017, she acted on this promise and became the first Hong Kong woman to reach the peak of this mighty mountain in Nepal. In 2021, she renewed the challenge: she reached the summit in 25 hours and 50 minutes, and became the fastest woman in the world to do so.

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