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Korean coaches' contribution to foreign athletes' winning Olympic medals

Korean coaches' contribution to foreign athletes' winning Olympic medals

Posted August. 09, 2016 06:43,   

Updated August. 09, 2016 06:55

한국어

Korean people roared into excitement at the 1976 Montreal Olympics as wrestler Yang Jung-mo won Korea's first gold medal. A poet at that time wrote, "A young athlete became Korean people's buddy and a blood brother as the Korean national flag waved high in the Montreal's sky." His gold medal was a gun salute that brought Korean pride into the sports stage when the economy was leaping. Twelve years later, Korea became an Olympics host country.

When Korea was still suffering from low growth, it excelled in martial arts sports, called as so-called hungry sports. At the Montreal Olympics, Korea participated in six sectors including boxing, wrestling, judo, shooting and men's and women's volley ball. Vietnam, whose per capita income is 1/13 that of Korea, sent 23 athletes in 10 sports to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Korea sent 204 athletes in 24 sports types.

Xuan Vinh Hoang has secured Vietnam's first Olympic gold medal in Rio, winning the men's 10-meter air pistol event. He went to military because he couldn't afford to enter college, but his talent surfaced while practicing AK to be qualified as a member of national team in a relatively old age. The training site lacked air conditioning and was always like a sauna place. When foreign athletes shot 300 per day, he was given only 50 but Hoang continued posture training without bullets. Because of the poor training condition, coach Park Chung-geon took the 41-year-old shooter to Korea for field training.

Felipe Almeida Wu, a Sao Paulo-born Chinese, has won silver while China's Pang Wei obtained bronze. Vietnamese people are excited that he beat China, which is mired in territorial disputes over the South China Sea. Hoang is known to have prevented his wife and children from coming to Brazil saying he was going there to carry out national duty and not for fun, showing a strict soldier spirit. Korean coaches entering into foreign countries to offer Olympic medals have also enhanced national prestige.