lit a candle 6h agoJust read about the 1964 Tokyo squad an hour ago and now I see this. Strange timing. Never knew Malaysia had a double international like that, hockey and football both.
Their story
Koh Hock Seng was a Malaysian sportsman who achieved the rare distinction of representing his country in both field hockey and football. A quick, hard working centre forward, he played hockey for Malaysia at two Olympic Games, Tokyo 1964 and Mexico City 1968, and won a bronze medal with the…
Koh Hock Seng was a Malaysian sportsman who achieved the rare distinction of representing his country in both field hockey and football. A quick, hard working centre forward, he played hockey for Malaysia at two Olympic Games, Tokyo 1964 and Mexico City 1968, and won a bronze medal with the national youth football team in 1965, all before walking away from sport at the age of 23. He died of liver cancer on Thursday 12 November 2026, aged 81.
He was born on 26 May 1945 in Malacca Town and learned his hockey at Malacca High School, a famous nursery of the game, where he played in the school team alongside the future Olympian Yang Siow Ming. His rise was rapid. In September 1964 he was named in the Malaysian hockey squad for the Tokyo Olympics, and at 19 he made his Olympic debut as Malaysia finished joint ninth.
The mid 1960s were his golden years. In 1965 he was part of the Malaysian side that won bronze at the Asian Youth Football tournament in Tokyo, making him a double international. In 1966 he played hockey at the Asian Games in Bangkok and was named in an Asian All-Stars squad. Two years later he went to his second Olympics in Mexico City, in a national team that included goalkeeper and captain Ho Koh Chye, Lawrence van Huizen, C. Paramalingam, R. Yogeswaran, Michael Arulraj and his old schoolmate Yang Siow Ming.
After Mexico City he retired from international sport, still only 23, to concentrate on his family business. He remained a respected figure in Melaka sport, and in August 2025 he was among eleven Melaka born Olympians and World Cup players honoured at a reunion organised by the state's hockey community at The Malacca Club.
In his final years he lived in a nursing home in Subang Jaya, where fellow Olympian Tam Chiew Seng visited him shortly before his death. Remembering the player he had watched as a boy at Malacca High School, Tam called him a great centre forward. His death came less than a fortnight after that of his 1968 Olympic teammate Savinder Singh, another loss for the generation that put Malaysian hockey on the world stage.
Biography adapted from New Straits Times (13 November 2026); The Star (28 November 2025); Olympedia; Wikipedia.
Photos
1Koh Hock Seng in his playing days
by People Forever
He was something else on the pitch, from what the old reports say.