In the preliminaries for the 400m, 200m and 100m freestyle events at the Rio Olympics, Park Tae-hwan failed to advance to the finals, and all three events, at his peak, were among the best in the world.
Park Tae-hwan, who is about to turn 27, is South Korea's national hero, and he is Asia's first double olympic double champion at the men's Olympic World Championships in the freestyle event, and is enshrined as a Korean national idol because of his sunny and handsome image.
In 2004, at the age of 15, Park Tae-hwan was already invincible in domestic competitions and made a name for himself in the international swimming world, winning the silver medal in the 1500m freestyle at the Short Pool World Cup, which attracted widespread attention.
He made a name for himself by winning 3 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, where he was named Korea's best athlete. At the 12th World Swimming Championships in Melbourne in 2007, park Tae-hwan won the first gold medal in the history of Korean swimming at the World Swimming Championships in the 400-meter freestyle and broke the Asian record. A year later, at the Beijing Olympic Games, Park Tae-hwan won the gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle, won South Korea's first gold medal in the history of the Olympic Games, and became the first men's Olympic world championships double champion in Asia's freestyle event.
With the birth of Sun Yang, Park Tae-hwan was completely defeated on all fronts, and at the London Olympic Games, he was completely defeated by Sun Yang. At the 2014 Incheon Asian Games, which fought on the mainland, he still won 7 medals and the number of Asian Games medals reached 20, creating a new record in the history of Korean sports.
Three months ago, Park Tae-hwan knelt down in public at a press conference because of the drug ban, asking the Korean Swimming Association to open up for itself and give herself a chance to fight for the Olympics again for the country, and said that she would not change her nationality for the Olympics, but only wanted to fight for honor for South Korea.
And after Park Tae-hwan exposed the drug scandal, his popularity in South Korea plummeted, and many netizens even named him "Yao Tae-hwan" and scolded him as a disgrace to the Korean sports community.
Although the Korean Olympic Committee eventually approved Park Tae-hwan's expectations of going to Rio. But Park Tae-hwan, who is in the decline of his career, even two months before the start of the Olympic Games, did not have a professional coach around him to guide him, let alone a professional pool for him to train, he can only maintain his physical fitness in the ordinary swimming pool. There, he didn't have a quiet training atmosphere, and even when he swam, he had to pay attention to avoiding those who had just learned to swim.
Such unsystematic training greatly reduced his strength. In an interview with his home media on August 7, he said he had really thought of giving up. Because he understands that such a training environment and training method cannot bring him back to the top. Park Tae-hwan still has one last race in Rio, the preliminaries for the men's 1500m freestyle, but he is unlikely to reach the final.