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Amanda Yap is trying for Singapore’s first world gymnastics medal, in between school exams
Rebecca Tauber
Oct. 24, 2025 8:23 am EDT
Amanda Yap walked across the balance beam like it was the floor. Her legs were straight; her splits hit 180. Watching her compete, you wouldn’t know it was her first time at the World Gymnastics Championships.
Yap’s performance in the qualification round in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Monday earned her a score of 13.300. Tuesday, once all 163 gymnasts from across the world had finished qualifications, Yap found out her ranking was high enough to make Saturday’s beam final, becoming the first gymnast from Singapore — man or woman — to reach a world championships final.
But by then, she was already home in Singapore.
“I was quite satisfied with my beam performance, but I really didn’t think it would be up there and score high enough to be able to get into finals,” Yap told The Athletic. “… Getting into finals was definitely not expected at all. So it was really very shocking.”
Yap, 15, and some of her teammates are in the middle of O-Levels, crucial international exams taken during secondary school — similar to high school in the U.S. — offered once per year and administered by Cambridge.
To avoid postponing the exams by an entire year, Yap and her family came up with a carefully scheduled plan. Yap took her first exam on Oct. 16, then took the short flight to Jakarta right after. She and her teammates had already applied for special consideration to miss a paper last Friday so they could make podium training, where athletes practice on competition surfaces in the arena.
“In the plane on the way to Jakarta … we were all studying for all our exams, and it was pretty crazy because we just finished the paper, and I was kinda brain dead, podium was the next day, and we had training in the morning,” Yap said.
In the days leading up to qualifications, Yap continued studying.
“There was a little cafe downstairs in our hotel, so every day we would go there, and all four of us in the team would just study, and then when it was time for training, then we would have to go train,” she said.
The plan was to compete in qualifications on Monday and fly back Tuesday for the next exam on Wednesday. Making a final was not part of the calculus. After all, no one from Singapore had ever done it before.
Yap found success last year, becoming the first gymnast from Singapore to win a medal at the Junior Artistic Gymnastics Asian Championships with a silver on beam. She and her sister Emma, 20, who also competed at worlds, have excelled on the national stage in Singapore.
But senior worlds is a whole other level of competition. The top eight gymnasts on each apparatus qualify for event finals, and when Yap finished qualifications, she was in third place with more than 100 gymnasts to follow, including athletes from powerhouse countries like Russia and China.
“I actually didn’t really wanna check (the rankings) so much because I also didn’t wanna have any expectations so that there won’t be any false hope,” Yap said.
But as qualifications continued, Yap’s status in the top eight held. All three Russian gymnasts — including 12-time Olympic and world medalist Angelina Melnikova — fell on beam. So did reigning Olympic and world beam silver medalist Zhou Yaqin of China. Suddenly, a door was open.
Yap’s father, Clarence, bought Wi-Fi on the flight home to Singapore — about two hours long — to follow the scoring live. By Tuesday night, the rankings were official. Yap was in seventh.
“We’re all super proud,” Clarence Yap said. “We were all crying last night with joy.”
But Yap couldn’t fly right back to Jakarta yet — she still had her exam on Wednesday.
“I don’t think it’s fully sunk in yet,” Yap said Thursday. “My mind was quite messy because there was a lot of things going through my mind. So I wasn’t really able to focus, but thankfully, by the time I got to the examination hall, I managed to think properly and get my mindset back into academics.”
The beam final is Saturday at 2 p.m. local time in Jakarta (3 a.m. Eastern). Yap was still in Singapore on Friday, preparing for another exam. She plans to fly back to Indonesia that night, compete in the final Saturday afternoon, then fly back home Sunday morning. She’ll spend all of next week taking exams.
Once done, Yap will be able to enroll in the Singapore Sports School, where her academic life will be more compatible with her athletic life. She has her eyes set on next year’s Asian Games in Japan, held every four years, with dreams of the Olympics, where only two gymnasts from Singapore have ever competed.
“Just being in the finals itself among these big names is really something that I would have never thought could happen, and it hasn’t really hit me yet,” Yap said. “I really just hope that I could inspire younger gymnasts.”
Yap is up against a tough field in the final. There’s China’s Zhang Qingying, who qualified in first with a 14.366 and won bronze Thursday in the all-around. Olympic and world medalist Flávia Saraiva of Brazil and European silver medalist Sabrina Maneca-Voinea of Romania tied for second, both with 13.833, and three-time world medalist Ellie Black of Canada was in fourth with 13.466. In eighth place was Algerian Olympic and world medalist Kaylia Nemour, one of the few people in the world who could make a beam final despite falling off the apparatus in qualifications.
“I’m hoping to just enjoy the moment, take this opportunity to gain exposure in the world stage and hopefully hit my routine and nail it,” Yap said.
But if qualifications proved anything, it’s that the event is all about who shows up when it matters. On balance beam, anything can happen.
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