SINGAPORE — Long before Aleksandar Duric became one of the most recognisable strikers in Singapore football, he was trying to reach the Olympic Games with little more than determination and an invitation to compete.
There was no luxury team charter.
No carefully managed athlete village journey.
No seamless high-performance programme.
Duric has recalled stopping cars and trucks as he made his way toward Barcelona during the breakup of Yugoslavia, eventually reaching the 1992 Olympic Games to represent the newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina in canoe sprint.
More than three decades later, his sporting journey has taken another unlikely turn.
The 56-year-old former Singapore international will travel to Japan for the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, not as an athlete but as one of Team Singapore’s two assistant chefs de mission.
Together with former national hockey player Fariza Zabir, Duric will support Chef de Mission Goh Kee Nguan and a Singapore delegation comprising more than 300 athletes across 27 sports from Sept. 19 to Oct. 4.
It is a striking full-circle moment.
The man who once struggled simply to reach the Olympics will now be helping younger Singapore athletes cope with the pressure of representing a country on one of Asia’s biggest sporting stages.
And that may explain why Duric sees his latest job differently from most officials.
He knows what it feels like when the athlete behind the medal pursuit needs someone to tell them simply to calm down, focus and keep going.
Before Singapore, there was hardship in Doboj
Duric was born in 1970 in Doboj, then part of Yugoslavia and now in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
His childhood was financially difficult.
He told CNA that his family lived beside a rubbish depot and that, after school, he and others would search for bottles, paper and metal that could be sold for small amounts of money.
Sport became one of the constants in that environment.
Duric began kayaking at around 12.
Sport Singapore says he quickly became exceptionally good at it: by 15 he was a junior national champion, at 16 a senior national champion, and by 17 was ranked among the leading junior competitors internationally.
Football was there too.
But kayaking was initially the sport taking him toward international competition.
Then Yugoslavia began falling apart.
War changed everything
By the early 1990s, armed conflict was spreading across the former Yugoslavia.
Duric found himself in Hungary and unable to simply return to the life he had known.
CNA describes the period as one in which political and military upheaval disrupted both his home and sporting career.
Yet an extraordinary opportunity appeared in 1992.
Bosnia and Herzegovina was preparing to make its Olympic debut as an independent nation.
Duric was invited to compete.
Olympedia records him as Bosnia and Herzegovina’s representative in the men’s C-1 500m canoe sprint at Barcelona. He finished fifth in his repechage and did not advance further.
The result itself was not historic.
Getting there was.
His route to Barcelona was nothing like a normal Olympic journey
Duric has described hitchhiking and relying on trucks and cars for parts of the trip.
He told CNA that while other Olympians normally travelled by plane with organised delegations, he was stopping vehicles simply to move closer to Barcelona.
He also said he lacked proper preparation and equipment.
Later accounts of the journey have described him travelling more than 1,500km through a Europe being reshaped by war and border changes before eventually reaching Spain.
Olympedia confirms that Bosnia and Herzegovina sent only a tiny inaugural Olympic team that year, with Duric its sole canoe-sprint competitor.
It was an Olympic appearance born less from ideal preparation than persistence.
And remarkably, canoeing would not even become the sport for which Singapore remembers him.
Football had always been in the background
Even when Duric was competing as a paddler, people around him kept suggesting that his real professional future might be in football.
He remembered that advice.
After Barcelona, his football career took him across Europe, Australia and China.
Then, in 1999, he arrived in Singapore.
Singapore was supposed to be another stop in a wandering career.
Instead, it became home.
He arrived in Singapore without even being an established striker
One of the strangest details of Duric’s football story is that the position that eventually made him famous was not originally his normal role.
When he arrived in Singapore and joined Tanjong Pagar United, he was converted into a centre-forward.
Duric later said adapting took roughly two months because he joined during the season and had not previously played as a striker.
It turned out to be an extraordinarily productive experiment.
Over a Singapore club career lasting about 15 years, Duric became one of the league’s defining forwards.
CNA credits him with eight top-flight league titles, three Singapore Cups and three Player of the Year awards.
SportSG says his scoring record across his Singapore league career remains unmatched, although historical sources count his goals differently depending on whether league, cup and other competitions are included.
The safest description is also the simplest:
Duric became the most prolific scorers of Singapore’s professional-league era and remained dangerous long past the age when most forwards retire.
Then Singapore gave him something bigger than a club contract
In 2007, Duric became a Singapore citizen.
He was already 37.
For most footballers, that would be an age for discussing retirement.
Singapore called him into the national team instead.
His debut came against Tajikistan in a World Cup qualifier in November 2007.
Duric scored twice.
Singapore won 2-0.
He later joked that he could have scored even more.
But the two goals were enough to make the point.
Singapore had given an international debut to a 37-year-old striker.
And the experiment worked.
He went on to score 24 times for Singapore
Duric eventually made 53 appearances and scored 24 goals for the Lions between 2007 and 2012.
CNA also notes that he became the first foreign-born player to captain Singapore.
His international career culminated in one of Singapore football’s most celebrated achievements.
At age 42, Duric was part of the side that won the 2012 AFF Suzuki Cup, beating Thailand 3-2 on aggregate in the final.
That tournament became his international farewell.
His national-team career had started at 37.
It ended with a regional championship five years later.
That longevity is difficult to overstate
Professional strikers depend on acceleration, strength, recovery and repeated high-intensity movement.
Most are long retired before reaching their forties.
Duric was still scoring goals in Singapore’s top flight at 44.
He finally ended his professional playing career in 2014, after more than two decades as a professional footballer overall.
His longevity became part of his reputation.
But the years after retirement reveal something more important about how he wanted his career to be remembered.
Before retiring, he made Singapore a promise
Duric published a farewell letter shortly before his final professional match.
The central theme was not goals or trophies.
It was gratitude.
He wrote that his next dream was to give back to the country that had given him so much and help young people in Southeast Asia pursue football and better lives.
Twelve years later, CNA asked him how well he had fulfilled that promise.
His answer was strikingly modest:
“Probably halfway.”
That response says something important about the way Duric sees his post-playing career.
The work is not finished because the point was never simply to become a famous former player who occasionally appears at football events.
He wanted to build something.
The ActiveSG Football Academy became that project
In 2016, Sport Singapore appointed Duric principal of the newly created ActiveSG Football Academy.
The objective was deliberately broad.
The academy would not exist only to identify elite players.
It would make structured, affordable football available to ordinary children while using the sport to teach teamwork, resilience, discipline and other life skills.
At launch, SportSG said it wanted boys and girls of different abilities and backgrounds to have access to the game.
Duric said his aim was to make sure every Singapore child who wanted to learn football had a pathway to do so.
That is a different mission from professional football.
The scoreboard is not the only measurement.
It started with about 500 children
According to CNA, the academy began in 2016 with roughly 500 children across five centres.
A decade later, it has grown to more than 4,000 participants across 17 centres.
SportSG’s current academy programme serves children from the preschool years through their teens and says the curriculum combines football development with character-building lessons around teamwork, honour and resilience.
The expansion is significant.
Four thousand children do not all need to become professional players for the programme to succeed.
Many never will.
The broader purpose is to make sport a lasting part of their lives.
Some of them are reaching elite football
Duric has nevertheless seen players progress through the system.
In a SportSG interview marking the academy’s seventh anniversary, he said some former participants had moved into Singapore Sports School, Centre of Excellence teams and Singapore Premier League clubs.
He recalled spotting one family of three children when the academy first opened at Jurong East Stadium.
Years later, one of those children had entered Singapore Sports School while a sister had become a women’s national-team player.
Those stories illustrate what a broad grassroots programme can do.
Elite talent can emerge from mass participation.
But only if enough children first get the chance to play.
Girls are becoming a bigger part of the programme too
CNA reports that in 2026 the ActiveSG Football Academy opened girls-only programmes at two centres.
That is a notable development in a sport whose local participation pipeline has traditionally been much deeper for boys.
Duric’s broader philosophy is that young players need opportunity before anyone knows how far their talent might take them.
For younger children, he has repeatedly stressed participation, enjoyment and development rather than treating every match as a professional result.
That makes the academy’s growth as important to his legacy as the trophies he collected as a player.
He still spends his weekends on football pitches
There is another telling detail in CNA’s profile.
More than a decade after retirement, Duric still spends many Saturday and Sunday mornings and afternoons standing on football fields surrounded by children.
He could have remained in professional coaching.
He could have pursued media work full-time.
He could have stepped away from the grind of weekly sessions.
Instead, much of his post-playing life has been spent at grassroots level.
That is not as glamorous as lifting trophies.
It may have a longer impact.
Singapore football has spent years asking how to produce another generation
Duric’s work also sits inside a much bigger national debate.
Singapore has spent years trying to rebuild a football pipeline capable of consistently producing players for the national team.
Grassroots participation is only one layer.
Players also need coaching.
Facilities.
Competitive matches.
Elite development.
Sports science.
Professional clubs capable of giving young players meaningful minutes.
And pathways that keep talented teenagers in football as educational and career pressures grow.
The ActiveSG Football Academy cannot solve every one of those issues.
SportSG originally designed it to complement the Football Association of Singapore’s elite-development structures, with talented participants able to move toward FAS pathways.
That separation matters.
A mass-participation academy should not be judged solely by how many national-team players it creates.
But if enough children enter football through it, Singapore’s talent pool becomes larger.
Duric’s life makes him an unusual mentor for young athletes
Most coaches can explain how to shoot or position a body.
Duric can also explain what happens when sport collides with circumstances an athlete cannot control.
He knows what it is like to grow up without much money.
To see a homeland torn apart by war.
To reach an Olympics without ideal preparation.
To change sports.
To move between countries.
To arrive in a foreign league.
To learn a new playing position.
To become a citizen of another country.
To make an international debut at 37.
And to keep competing when conventional sporting timelines said he should already have stopped.
That does not mean every young player should try to copy his journey.
It means he has experienced enough different forms of sporting uncertainty to understand that one setback does not always determine the ending.
That experience is now going to the Asian Games
This is where his appointment as assistant chef de mission becomes more than ceremonial.
At Aichi-Nagoya, Singapore will have athletes from vastly different sports facing the same emotional pressures.
Some will be teenagers.
Others will be experienced Olympians.
Some will be medal favourites.
Others may simply be experiencing their first major Games.
The job of the chef de mission team is to support the delegation and help create the conditions in which athletes can perform. The Olympic Council of Asia says Duric and Fariza were selected partly because of the high-performance experience they bring as former national athletes.
Duric told CNA that his athlete background could help him recognise when someone needs reassurance before competition.
That sounds simple.
At a major Games, it rarely is.
Athletes can train for years for one moment
The difference between a medal and elimination can be a fraction of a second.
An athlete can arrive healthy and suddenly feel overwhelmed.
A favourite can underperform.
A first-time competitor can freeze.
A result can become emotionally enormous because years of training have been compressed into one race, bout, routine or match.
Duric knows that environment.
He also knows that sporting careers are longer than a single result.
At Barcelona in 1992, he did not reach the canoe final.
Few people looking at that result could have imagined what came next.
Professional football.
Singapore citizenship.
National-team captaincy.
An ASEAN title.
A decades-long career.
Thousands of children coached.
And now an Asian Games leadership role.
His Barcelona result was not the defining result of his sporting life
That may be the most useful lesson he can bring to younger Singapore athletes.
Elite sport naturally teaches people to measure themselves with positions and medals.
First.
Second.
Eliminated.
Qualified.
Selected.
Dropped.
Duric’s career shows why those categories can become misleading when viewed across decades.
His Olympic canoeing career ended without a medal.
His football career did not begin in the country he would eventually represent.
His Singapore international career did not begin until an age when most players are near retirement.
Yet at 42 he was celebrating an AFF championship.
At 44 he was still playing professionally.
And at 56 he is going back to a major multi-sport Games with Team Singapore.
He still does not think the giving-back job is finished
The most revealing part of CNA’s interview may therefore be that one word:
halfway.
The academy already has more than 4,000 participants.
Duric has already spent a decade working in youth football.
Some of the children who entered the programme are old enough to be playing professionally.
Yet he does not describe the promise he made in 2014 as fulfilled.
That creates an interesting contrast with his playing career.
Football gave him obvious finish lines.
A final whistle.
A league title.
A cup final.
Retirement.
Giving back has no such ending.
Singapore gave Duric a second sporting life
His career began in a country that no longer exists in the form in which he knew it.
War disrupted his early adulthood.
Sport took him elsewhere.
Australia became part of his football journey.
China became another stop.
Then Singapore became permanent.
He became a citizen.
He scored for the national team.
He captained it.
He helped it win a regional championship.
Then he stayed after retirement and went to work with its children.
That is why his story resonates beyond statistics.
It is not simply about an imported footballer who scored many goals.
It is about an athlete whose adopted country eventually became the place where he chose to invest the second half of his sporting life.
And now another generation gets the benefit of everything that went wrong along the way
Duric’s biggest achievements are easy to list.
An Olympian.
Eight Singapore league titles.
Three Singapore Cups.
Three Player of the Year awards.
Twenty-four international goals.
Fifty-three Singapore caps.
An AFF championship.
But those numbers leave out the part of his experience that may be most valuable to young athletes.
He also knows what failure feels like.
What uncertainty feels like.
What starting over feels like.
And what it feels like to have a sporting future that makes no sense on paper.
That may be precisely why his Asian Games role fits.
More than 30 years after desperately finding a way to get himself to an Olympic Games, Duric will arrive at Aichi-Nagoya with a very different responsibility.
This time, he does not need to worry about reaching the start line.
His job is to help make sure Singapore’s athletes are ready when they reach theirs.
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