Looking back on 2023 | The frog king and butterfly are competing for beauty, Chinese swimming has regained its glory, and the Paris Olympics is worth looking forward to
Chinese swimming in 2023 is marked by a series of major achievements in the international arena by Zhang Yufei and Qin Haiyang, the queen of butterflies, and the Chinese swimming has a strong international competitiveness in the Paris Olympic cycle.
The highlight of the 2023 international swimming competition will be the Fukuoka World Championships, followed by the FINA World Cup. The continental competition, which was held in Hangzhou in late September, did not represent the highest level in the world, but because it was held in China, it also attracted a lot of attention.
The Fukuoka Swimming World Championships is a battlefield for the Chinese swimming team, which swept away the slump of only 1 gold at the World Championships in Budapest last year, which was still during the epidemic, and won 5 golds, 3 silvers and 8 bronzes, ranking third in the swimming gold medal list after Australia and the United States, and at the same time making an important contribution to the Chinese delegation ranking first in the gold medal list. Among these 5 gold medals, the frog king Qin Haiyang and the butterfly queen Zhang Yufei contributed a lot. In particular, Qin Haiyang's achievements have improved by leaps and bounds, and he is completely at the world leader in the men's three breaststroke events, he not only won all the gold medals in the three events from 50m to 200m breaststroke in Fukuoka, becoming the first person in history, but also broke the world record in the 200m breaststroke and was promoted to the new world frog king.
With 5 gold medals at the Hangzhou Asian Games and 9 gold medals in all competitions at the FINA World Games in Athens, Berlin and Budapest, Qin Haiyang was named the best male swimmer in the World Cup, which is a historic feat of Chinese swimming. Qin's new goal is to break the world record held by British star Adam Peaty in two breaststroke sprint events.
Zhang Yufei is not far behind, although she has not yet reached an absolute monopoly in the women's butterfly event, but as a new generation of Chinese butterfly queen, she deserves it. In addition to winning the gold medal in the women's 100m butterfly at the Fukuoka World Championships, she also cooperated with teammates Qin Haiyang, Xu Jiayu and Cheng Yujie to win the men's and women's 4×100m medley relay finals, finally breaking her gold medal drought at the World Championships. Only one day after the end of the Fukuoka World Championships, Zhang Yufei transferred to the Chengdu Universiade, won 9 battles and 9 victories, and won all the championships in all competitions. If you add the preliminaries, semi-finals and finals of the World Championships, Zhang Yufei listened to the starting pistol more than 30 times on the starting platform in half a month. Her rhythm is similar to that of Qin Haiyang, but because she has more events, she is the first model worker of the Chinese swimming team.
After Zhang Yufei won 6 gold medals in the Asian Games, she tied the gold medal record held by Rikako Ikee in the history of the event, and then she flew to Europe with Qin Haiyang in the same group, and won 6 gold medals in the three World Cup sub-stations, except for the 50-meter butterfly, which is a very explosive event, she has a slight gap compared with the world record holder Sjoström, and is in the lead in the other two distances of the butterfly. Like Qin Haiyang, Zhang Yufei has also won 23 gold medals in the international arena this season, and he is famous at home and abroad.
In addition to these two representatives, at the World Championships in Fukuoka, the Chinese men's team also won the silver medal in the 4×100m medley relay final for the first time, and the medalists were Xu Jiayu, Qin Haiyang, Wang Changhao and Pan Zhanle, of which Pan Zhanle is the world's highest level athlete who emerged from the Chinese team in the men's 100-meter freestyle event with unlimited potential. Veteran Xu Jiayu won gold and silver at the World Championships again after four years (the gold medal is the men's and women's 4×100m medley relay), Zhejiang teenager Yu Yiting won the World Championships medal for the first time (women's 200m individual medley), and Li Bingjie, the first Asian person in the middle and long distance freestyle, won multiple medals.
As for continental competitions such as the Asian Games, the Chinese swimming team has left its old rival Japan far behind, winning 24 gold medals and establishing an unbreakable Asian hegemony. It can be said that 2023 is a bumper year for Chinese swimming, and it has returned to the peak era of ten years ago when it had the strength to win more than 5 gold medals at the World Championships.
Looking ahead to 2024, there will be two major tournaments a year, first the World Championships in Doha in February and then the Paris Olympics in July. Judging from the selection of the just-concluded national championships, the Chinese swimming team will not send all the main forces to Doha, but Zhang Yufei and Qin Haiyang will definitely go to Doha, and the total number of gold medals may be slightly lower than that of the Fukuoka World Championships, but winning the gold medal is completely guaranteed. The most important Paris Olympic Games, the Chinese water army will inevitably go all out, and to adjust the athletes' best competitive state to July, with the golden age, hard work, strong fighting spirit and other comprehensive indexes of the two ace main forces, the Chinese swimming team in Paris can still maintain the same gold medal and medal competitiveness as the Fukuoka World Championships, which is very worth looking forward to.
Text/Beiqing Sports Liu Ailin