A seven-year-old Australian boy who battled through an untimely bout of hiccups as he sang his national anthem at a sports match said he could not shake off the condition before the game, even after his father tried to “scare” them away.
Ethan Hall had the job of singing Advance Australia Fair at a baseball match between the Adelaide Bite and Brisbane Bandits in Adelaide on Friday evening.
Despite his unfortunate dilemma, the youngster bravely ploughed on with his job – every other line of the song punctuated with a hiccup that echoed around the stadium.
With players on each team struggling to hide their sniggers behind their baseball caps, Ethan held his composure until the end of the anthem before being widely applauded by the crowd and earning high-fives from the players.
The video has been viewed millions of times online, and Ethan told ITV’s Good Morning Britain how his bout of hiccups had come at home before his big moment and that his father tried to help him stop them.
He said: “At home I had the hiccups when I was getting changed and then daddy scared me. I wasn’t expecting it. He actually didn’t scare me, he scared the hiccups.”
Despite getting rid of them for a short while, they came back, forcing him to endure them as he sang the anthem.
His mother, Kylie, said he had been a bit overwhelmed with all the attention, but was proud of the resilience he had shown in dealing with the unfortunate predicament and subsequent interest in him.
She said: “He had to make a decision as to what he did, so that’s something we can always call on forever.”