SINGAPORE – Vanessa Lee’s national record-breaking spree continues as she rewrote her own women’s 3,000m steeplechase mark with a time of 11min 4.18sec to finish third at the Hong Kong Athletics Championships on May 10.

She shaved almost five seconds off her previous best of 11:09.16 set at the 2024 Singapore Open, as she gets closer to Vietnamese Nguyen Thi Huong’s 2023 SEA Games bronze-medal time of 11:00.85, which is also the qualifying mark for this year’s SEA Games set by the Singapore National Olympic Council.

Ahead of her, South Korea’s Bohana Nbm won in 10:48.01 and Hong Kong’s Tsang Hiu Tung was second in 11:01.52.

Lee, 27, has been in fine form over the last couple of years.

Besides the steeplechase mark, she also holds four other national records in the women’s 10km road race (35:55), 10km cross country (40:21), mile (5:18.63) and 5,000m (17:06.69).

Her 5,000m record was set at the Box Hill Run in Melbourne, Australia in March, obliterating her previous mark of 17:26.62 clocked in 2024.

Lee had finished sixth in the women’s 5,000m and seventh in the 10,000m at the 2023 SEA Games, but her women’s 5,000m personal best is faster than Vietnamese Pham Thi Hong Le’s silver-medal winning time of 17:06.72.

Also at the Wan Chai Sports Ground, 21-year-old Elizabeth-Ann Tan broke sprint queen Shanti Pereira’s national women’s under-23 record in the 100m by a hundredth of a second when she won her semi-final in 11.72 to qualify for the final on May 11 as the second-fastest athlete behind Hong Kong’s Chan Pui Kei, who won her semi-final in 11.70.

Pereira had set the previous mark of 11.73 at the 2017 SEA Games and equalled the time at the 2018 Singapore Open, while Tan also clocked the same time at the 2025 Singapore Open in April.

• David Lee is senior sports correspondent at The Straits Times focusing on aquatics, badminton, basketball, cue sports, football and table tennis.

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