Meet Summer Wong, the face of Hong Kong’s growing OCR scene
Ninja sports and obstacle course racing hone confidence, courage and problem-solving – and a local giant is making our tiny city proud
Summer Wong Man-ting, 31, was ready to sprint into her final race at the 2025 World Obstacle – UIPM OCR World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, last September. Coming off a race in Barbados less than a month before, however, she was still recovering from both jet lag and injuries, and the relentless rain and 12-degree Celsius temperature had aggravated her cold. The horn blared, and the chorus of Banners’ “Someone to You” ripped through the tense air.
Wong had one shot against Melia Ochsner, a 2019 contestant on the reality-television show American Ninja Warrior, to win gold in the female 20- to 39-year-old 100-metre category. The women remained neck to neck throughout the race, one taking the lead only for the other to catch up within mere milliseconds. Finally, on the third-to-last obstacle – the climbing holds – Wong shook off Ochsner and finished the race in 48.21 seconds, just 1.38 seconds ahead of her opponent, becoming the first Hongkonger to claim the throne at the championships.
Much of OCR today builds on ninja sports, which originated in Japan in 1997 as a television game show called Sasuke, named after the mythical ninja Sarutobi Sasuke. This became the blueprint for the acclaimed American Ninja television franchise in the late 2000s. Though both OCR and ninja games involve a race for time, the latter usually feature solo obstacle courses that emphasise small, detailed movements and more upper-body strength. While OCR obstacles are set and made public before almost every event, ninja competitions are kept hush-hush and can take place far outside the box, in the back gardens of zealous athletes or even atop the 190-metre-high Swiss bungee jump site Bungy Niouc. Yet, the lines between the sister sports are becoming increasingly blurred. Wong, though better known for her achievements in OCR, for instance, identifies as a ninja.
The demand for physical fitness for World Obstacle’s latest OCR set up in Sweden was at a whole new level
Since 2023, OCR has been enjoying a new-found spotlight after it was announced it would replace equestrianism in the modern pentathlon event at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games. Since then, the event’s governing body, the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM), has been hosting OCR races around the world in partnership with local organisations to perfect “a new Pentathlon format designed to thrill audiences onsite, on TV and online”, according to its website.