Source: Sports Weekly
On January 5, professional swimming media SwimSwam announced that Wang Shun, the winner of Asia's Best Male Swimmer in 2021 and the men's 200m medley champion at the Tokyo Olympics, won the award.
Wang Shun was the only Asian male swimmer to reach the championship podium at the Tokyo Olympics. In the preliminary round of the men's 200 medley final, Wang Shun was seventh in 1:57.42; in the semifinals, Wang Shun swam again with a good time of 1:56.22, only 0.06 seconds away from the national record he held. In the final, Wang Shunze broke the Asian record held by Kosuke Haruno with a time of 1:55.0 and won the gold medal, which was only third in history behind Rochte and Phelps. At the National Games after the Tokyo Olympics, Wang Shun once again won the gold medal in the men's 200m medley with a good time of 1:56.33, which also ranked third in the final of the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Wang Shun is also the second Chinese athlete to win the award, after Sun Yang was voted Asia's Best Male Swimmer in 2013, 2015 and 2017. The winner of the award last year was The Japanese star Kosuke Hagino, and Seto Daisuke also won the award.
In the "Top Ten Performances of the Year" awards previously announced by SwimSwam, the Chinese women's 4x200m freestyle relay team composed of Yang Junxuan, Tang Muhan, Zhang Yufei and Li Bingjie was shortlisted for the performance in the final of the Tokyo Olympic Games. The Chinese women's team defeated the most seen Australian women's team before the game and the powerful American women's team to win the championship and broke the world record for the project. The final was also called by Swim Swarm as "one of the most memorable matches of the Tokyo Olympics".