By Alessa Pang

THREE Singaporean students are the talk of the town after placing third at the prestigious World Schools Debating Championships held in Greece last month.

The trio - Anish Hazra, 18, Lee Jia Wei, 17, and Teoh Ren Jie, 15 - were also ranked among the top 10 speakers of the competition. This is the first time since 2001 that all three speakers from Singapore made the list.

The team, comprising students from Raffles Institution, beat those from Mexico, Qatar, Holland, Slovenia and Australia but lost in the semi-finals to New Zealand, the eventual winners.

At 15, Ren Jie is an old hand at debating, having attended last year's competition, in which Singapore placed 10th, and was ranked fourth-best speaker this year. The competition's oldest debaters are 18.

One of the team's coaches, Mrs Geetha Creffield, who heads the Arts department at Anglo-Chinese Junior College, said: 'Youth is never an impediment to excellence. This team exhibited mental agility and fortitude, and were able to harness their knowledge effectively.'

The only child of an orthodontist and a businessman, Ren Jie joined his school's debating club in Secondary 1.

He said: 'I had some exposure to debating in primary school and found it interesting because it allows people to exchange ideas in a format which is more competitive and allowed me to get away with arguing.'

The teen also took part in Judo and was the vice-captain of the 'C' division team. He stopped partly due to a knee injury and to focus on debating.

Just before the 10-day tournament, the team, including two reserves, made a pit stop at Oxford University, where they had warm-up sessions with university debaters along with alumni members of Singapore's previous debating teams who are currently students there.

Team captain Anish, who is also an active member of his school's drama club, said: 'The warm-up spars changed us as debaters. They were excellent debaters who showed to us a whole new style of debating with their radical cases. They really pushed us to our limits and forced us to improve to a new level.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.