SINGAPORE – Since clinching bronze at the Asian Mountain Bike Championships in October, Riyadh Hakim has gone from strength to strength, inking a three-year deal with a professional cycling team at the start of 2024.
The 25-year-old is also part of the inaugural batch of Sports Excellence Potential (spexPotential) Award recipients announced on April 2. The award is part of Singapore’s high performance sports system that provides holistic and personalised support to athletes.
Riyadh said: “I tried to apply for the scholarship for the past three years and never got it, but now with the spexPotential, I’ll take whatever support I can get because it’s not easy to be an athlete in Singapore.
“What I have now is basically very minimal support from the federation, just for us to go to big races such as the SEA Games and the Asian championships, but in terms of monthly support and equipment, we will have to find our own.”
His new team, Asia Union TCS, is the first and only UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) registered team in Asia and he is training alongside some of the region’s best, including Indonesia’s two-time SEA Games gold medallist Sayu Bella and Japan’s 2022 cross-country eliminator (XCE) national champion Yuta Matsumoto.
The team is led by manager Kohei Yamamoto, who is a 10-time Asian Championship winner and four-time Olympian.
Although the team’s staff are based in Japan, their riders will continue to train with their respective national teams in their home countries.
“We are trying to look for the best optimised programme because our calendar is quite packed. So I’m not sure how it will be, to be based in one country instead of flying out from our own country,” added Riyadh.
National team coach Junaidi Hashim believes that Riyadh will benefit immensely from joining a pro team, saying: “This is definitely an opportunity for him to have experience riding in a pro team as previously he was racing in the local clubs and the national team. To have a team to support him definitely is the way to go.”
He is now in Thailand for a road race with the national team and has two other training camps in Europe and Japan lined up. He previously did a three-week training camp in the Philippines and Indonesia.
He will race in May’s Asian Continental Championships in Malaysia before the MTB Eliminator World Championships in Germany two months later.
Sharing that his “biggest goal” is the World Championships, he added: “The past two years I have been very, very close. In 2022, I was 11th and then in 2023 I was ninth so I always feel like I have the potential.
“That is really one of my biggest goals, to be world champion in the XCE.”
