Two-time SEA Games marathon champion Soh Rui Yong lost a defamation suit to fellow runner Ashley Liew and was ordered to pay S$180,000 in damages, crowdfunding the sum from supporters after his appeal failed. The dispute, over Liew's celebrated act of sportsmanship at the 2015 SEA Games, capped years of clashes that also saw Soh omitted from national teams despite qualifying.
The underlying race became Singapore sporting folklore. At the dark, early-morning 2015 SEA Games marathon in Singapore, the leading pack missed a U-turn; Liew took the correct turn, found himself ahead, and was reported to have slowed to let the others catch up, finishing eighth. The Singapore National Olympic Council gave him a Special Award for Sportsmanship and the International Fair Play Committee awarded him its World Fair Play Trophy in 2016.
Soh, who won that marathon and again in 2017, publicly disputed Liew's account from 2018, saying the story on which the awards rested was untrue; other runners in the race, including Filipino competitor Rafael Poliquit Jr., backed aspects of Soh's version in media interviews. Liew, after legal letters offering a chance to retract, sued for defamation, and Soh counterclaimed.
A district judge ruled in September 2021 that Soh's statements were defamatory, ordered the statements removed and an apology published, restrained republication and awarded S$180,000. Soh turned to crowdfunding as Liew's lawyers sought prompt payment, appealed, and lost in the High Court in 2022, where Justice Valerie Thean upheld liability and damages while setting aside the order to publish an apology and retraction. Soh paid the full amount, reported at about S$320,000 including costs, in April 2022 and publicly challenged Liew to donate the damages — which had been funded by Soh's supporters — to prove his sportsmanship. Liew did not comment.
The courtroom fight ran parallel to a selection war. In 2019 the SNOC rejected Soh's nomination for the Philippines SEA Games despite his meeting the qualifying mark, citing conduct falling short of expected standards, and Singapore Athletics endorsed the decision; Soh sued the association in related proceedings and was later also omitted from the Asian Games first-cut squad in 2022. He also lost a separate defamation action he brought against a former Singapore Athletics director, in a judgment that catalogued earlier controversies, including cutting holes in sponsor-issued attire, which cost a sponsor, and breaching a sponsor blackout period before the 2017 Games.
Soh's supporters see a pattern of an outspoken athlete punished by a conservative sports establishment; officials see an athlete repeatedly breaching codes that bind everyone else. Both readings draw on the same record of social-media attacks on administrators, which judges and selectors quoted back at him.
He eventually returned to SEA Games competition and won a silver medal in the 10,000 metres in 2023, a partial sporting rehabilitation. But the Liew judgment stands as the expensive centre of his public story: in Singapore, even a dispute about who slowed down in the dark can, once lawyers are engaged, cost a champion six figures and define him more lastingly than two gold medals.