Manama, Bahrain, August 27, 2025: When May Ooi was eight years-old, her dad told her ‘No, girls do not fight!’, so she went on to become an Olympic swimmer for Singapore.
At 49, the wheel has long turned a full circle. After retiring from swimming, she learned jiu-jitsu and represented the city-state at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and Palembang. Today, she is a respected referee in mixed martial arts.
It has been an eventful life so far for the girl who was once sent home from kindergarten for fighting with the boys.
“I always had a propensity to get into fights,” laughs May, the Referee Instructors’ Team Leader at the 1st OCA-AMMA Development Programme for Coaches and Referees in Bahrain.
“When my dad told me girls don’t fight, I then put all my energy into becoming a swimmer. But I always wanted to practise martial arts, and I’m happy to have done that too,” she relates.
At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, May represented Singapore in the 100m and 200m butterfly, and the 200m and 400m individual medley events. She retired from competitive swimming in 2002 to pursue her studies in medicine at Charles University in Prague.
She is a qualified General Practitioner, but in another one of life’s twists, on a visit to Brazil, she witnessed the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira which includes elements of dance, acrobatics and music.
She started training capoeira and her coach happened to be a brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The wheel had turned full circle. May went on to represent Singapore in a second sport, jiu-jitsu, before switching her attention to MMA.
When she puts her mind to anything, she succeeds, and Mighty May was soon a professional MMA fighter. “My record was 4-2 in professional bouts.”
The cruel passage of time meant she had to retire from the competitive mat, but she continued in an administrative role with the Jiu-Jitsu Association of Singapore.
In 2022, the MMA Association of Singapore was formed. The Singapore National Olympic Committee asked May to help this new body out, and she threw herself into it heart and soul.
“The Singapore NOC asked me to see what I could do to help. But I wanted to learn something new, so I decided to become a MMA referee,” she recounts.
Voila, so we have May the MMA referee here in Bahrain. She has a tip on how to be a good ref: “You have to be able to function under pressure, and having been an athlete, I am used to this pressure, it is not an uncomfortable space for us,” she reveals.
So what’s her take on MMA and the rules that govern the sport? Is it complex? “No, the rules are clear. It is how you interpret the rules. It is like the Bible. It is how the reader interprets it,” says May who has been in the thick of it all in Bahrain.
“As this is a development programme, the range of referees here are from those new to officiating to those more experienced. But these last three days have been a wonderful experience,” she added.
