Joshua Ngo is up every morning before the sun. The 70-year-old slips on a cycling jersey and pair of shorts, both skin-tight to prevent chafing, before heading out the door. By 6am – as he’s done almost every day in the 20 years – the silver is planted firmly on his De Rosa fixie, where he’ll stay for the next three hours and 60km of road.
His cycling route takes him on a 2.16km loop around a hilly Seletar landed estate. He keeps it simple – hooking lefts all the way through for 28 laps, eliminating riskier right turns and keeping his efforts on an even keel.
By around 9am, with lungs and legs burning, he retires to a neighbourhood mall for coffee, having racked up a sizable elevation gain of 750m. He says this is almost five times more than what he’d get for the usual cross-island ride most cyclists take.
But Joshua is not like most cyclists. Over the course of his ride in life, he’s picked up four serious ailments, each one of them a formidable hurdle in their own right.
At just three years of age, he became one of the “few unlucky victims” to contract polio during an outbreak here in the 1950s, leading to stunted development in his left leg.
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Cycling for health
In fact, he only got into cycling – the one cardiovascular sport that felt right for his imbalanced footing – in his late 40s, looking to turn his health around after developing high blood pressure (hypertension) during his time working in a marine accommodation systems company based in China.
Joshua persevered still when he was later found to have osteoporosis in 2008 after breaking his first bone – then 30 others. He hasn’t downshifted, despite removing a third of his one lung in 2023 when cancer struck.
Even now, with a medical history that would turn any insurance salesman pale, he possesses remarkable physical endurance for someone of his vintage. In 2015, he became one of only eight Singaporeans to complete the gruelling 1,200km Audax Paris-Brest-Paris cross-country ride.
The feat took him 88 hours, 32 minutes to complete. At the age of 61, he was the oldest competitor that race.
Staying in the cycling game
The silver rattles off the years in which a hard fall during cycling resulted in a broken bone: “2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2016.”
"But for me, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to let go of this opportunity to get back my health."
Joshua maintains that the vast majority of his crashes were unavoidable accidents, such as when a rider right in front of him flipped over, leading to an immediate crash.
But he persevered, working hard to physically and mentally recover from the “phobia” of every crash and broken bone with resistance exercises like push-ups and chin-ups.
I'm hanging onto it so that I can keep fit and build up my health. If the cancer were to come back, or some other medical illness come my way, at least I'll be in good shape to face it positively, he adds.
Attitude is everything
A pastime that originally began as a means of transport to a nearby gym – Joshua’s first choice when it came to improving his fitness back in his 40s – had now become a passion.
Having retired since December 2021, the silver now regularly participates in amateur cycling challenges on the likes of Strava, a sport-tracking app, when he’s not hanging out with family.
The Nordic country is a special place to the silver, who spent the latter half of his career before retirement working for a Swedish tile innovation company.
One challenge he recently participated in was Everesting – where cyclists accumulate the equivalent of Mount Everest’s 8,848m-height with rides across a certain period – for Second Chances, with the goal of raising funds to support ex-offenders’ reintegration into society.
The senior ended up as first runner-up for “Top Elevation Gained” and “Most Funds Raised” in the male category.
Indeed, Joshua faces his own adversities in life with that same light-hearted candour.
