THE 98TH NATIONAL SPORTS FESTIVAL OF KOREA
- Saturday, October 21st – Thursday, October 26th
- Cheongju Indoor Swimming Pool, Chungbuk
- LCM
- Recap #1
- Results (Korean)
The 98th National Sports Festival of Korea wrapped up tonight, with Olympian Park Tae Hwan taking home a haul of 5 gold medals. In addition to the men’s 4x200m freestyle and individual 200m freestyle event we reported in our first-half recap, Park also took on the individual 400m freestyle, as well as the 4x100m free and 4x100m medley relays.
In the 400m free, Park clocked a solid mark of 3:50.89 for the win by almost 3 seconds, although what he produced in Chungbuk was well off the 3:44.30 he notched for 4th place in Budapest this past summer. Park will return to training in Australia, where he’s been under the guidance of Warringah’s Tim Lane.
Two meet records fell on the women’s side during the last half of the meet, courtesy of Kim Seo-young and An Se Hyeon. The former crushed a new 200m IM competition standard, clocking a winning time of 2:10.17 to take gold by over 4 seconds.
For An Sehyeon, the World Championships finalist wreaked havoc in her pet event, the women’s 100m butterfly. She fired off a big time of 57.86 to top the podium in a new meet record, the only mark of the field under 58 seconds.
An made the finals of both the 100m and 200m butterfly races in Budapest, with her 4th place finish in the latter representing the best result ever by a South Korean woman at a major international competition. She holds 3 national records across the fly events.
The U.S. will always be better.
MERICA ALWAYS AND FOREVER
I expect you will see South Korea become a regional superpower in swimming over the next decade. They have the facilities, the kids who started swimming because of Park’s gold are coming of age, and they’re hosting long course worlds in 2019. They have the economic resources to do it. I am rooting for An Sehyeon to make the podium in 2020.
China and Japan will dominate always
Singapore is on the rise as well
But they’re so tiny! Almost 300 times smaller than China population-wise, lol.
They for sure have the resources to keep pumping out decent individual swimmers, though.
One swimmer
I’d have you know that the Singapore Male Relay National Records (save for the Medley, which is 0.03 slower) are all faster than the South Koreans, and Singapore has a very big chance to beat out South Korea for the Relay Bronzes at the Asian Games come next September. Right now they might only have two prominent swimmers in Schooling and Quah, but they are definitely a country on the rise, and to me much more so than South Korea because the times on the men’s sides are improving much more drastically than South Korea’s.