Reuters/Singapore

With Southeast Asia conquered again, Pandelela Rinong, the brightest star in Malaysia’s crack diving team, has set her sights on bigger things.
The diminutive 22-year-old won the women’s 10-metre platform gold medal at the SEA Games on Tuesday for the fourth time in a row, proving beyond any doubt that she’s the top female diver in the region.
But Pandelela hardly had enough time to dry herself off before she turned her attention back to her ultimate goal - to conquer the world.
She has come close before. At the 2012 London Olympics, she finished third in the individual platform final, becoming the first woman from Malaysia to win an Olympic medal.
In 2009 and 2013 she won bronze medals in synchronized diving at the world championships. Pandelela also won a silver medal at last year’s Commonwealth Games and a bronze at the Asian Games despite battling a knee injury in the lead-up to both events.
While she been stockpiling plenty of medals, her near-misses at the highest level have only strengthened her resolve to become the best in the world.
“These SEA Games have given me the motivation to train harder for the world championships and to qualify for the Rio Olympics,” she said.
“It’s kind of hard to maintain that but I always try to focus and train harder than the others.”
To achieve her life’s dream, Pandelela has decided to give up synchronized diving and focus all her attention on the individual event.
She is also working on a new, more complicated, dive that she hopes will get her enough points to get over the top of her main rivals from China.
At the SEA Games, she stuck with her normal routine, starting with a forward three-and-a-half somersault that impressed the judges.
She messed up her entry on her next dive, a backward two-and-a-half somersault, but entered the water cleanly in her remaining three dives to win easily, nearly 50 points more than her nearest rival.
Pandelela’s next target is this year’s world championships in Russia, where she hopes to unveil a new backward two-and-a-half somersault that she’s been working on in training but hasn’t tried in competition yet.
“My target this year is to learn a new dive,” she said.
“I don’t have much time to learn it so I just continued with my old routine (at the SEA Games).
“But I hope for this (next) world championship I will try to learn a new dive.”