Will he do it like Park Tae-hwan in 2011?
A poor performance in qualifying can be a bitter pill to swallow.
In the final, it’s important to forget about the other swimmers and race your own race. A good example of this is Park Tae-hwan, who won the 2011 World Aquatics Championships in the same event after receiving lane one. Kim Woo-min can do it too.
Kim Woo-min, who is expected to bring South Korea its first Olympic medal in swimming in 12 years, will be aiming for a ‘lane one miracle’. He competed in Tokyo three years ago as part of the relay team and has since risen through the ranks to become one of the world’s favorite middle-distance racers. Now it’s time for him to showcase his talent once again in the Olympic final.
Kim Woo-min will attempt to win his first Olympic medal at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games when he competes in the men’s 400-meter freestyle final at 3:42 a.m. ET today (Aug. 28) at La Défense swimming pool in Paris, France.
Kim clocked 3:45.52 in the afternoon preliminaries of the same event on Sunday, finishing seventh overall out of 37 swimmers to punch his ticket to the final, which is awarded to the top eight swimmers. Kim’s spot in the final was somewhat expected. He reached the final of the same event three times in a row at the last three consecutive World Aquatics Championships, from 2022 to this year, and won gold this year.
However, her performance was not good. She had a few close calls and moments where she almost fell.
Woo Min Kim started the day in lane 5 of heat 4. Right next to him in lane 4 was Samuel Short, the winner of last year’s Fukuoka World Championships. Last year’s and this year’s world champions swam together in the preliminaries. Kim Woo-min was considered to be the favorite to win the gold medal at the Olympics, so it was expected that if they competed well against each other, Kim Woo-min would be able to accept a decent time and ranking.
But when the lid was lifted, that was not the case. In Heats 1-3, Chinese rookie Fei Liwei was the fastest in 3:44.60, while Kim finished fourth in Heat 4. In the final heat of five, which featured the fastest runners, only four of them were faster than Kim’s time, which could have resulted in a shock elimination.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. At the end of the five-race heat, only two top ranked athletes were ahead of Kim: this year’s world No. 1 Lukas Martens (GER – 3:44.13) and 2022 World Championships gold medalist Elijah Winnington (AUS – 3:44.87). Kim ended up finishing seventh in her heat.
Kim clocked 3:45.14 in qualifying for this year’s World Championships. At last year’s World Championships in Fukuoka, he ran 3:44.52 in qualifying. At the Olympics, where athletes are expected to give it their all after preparing for the event, his qualifying time was lower than at the World Championships.
Kim’s 400m freestyle races are characterized by her blowing 메이저사이트 away the field early on and then holding on for dear life in the final 200 meters to secure first place. He did the same thing at the 2024 World Championships, where he won gold.
This time, however, the Olympic trials were a little different, with Kim leading Short (3:44.88) and Guilherme Costa (BRA – 3:44.23) until 150 meters, when he faded a bit and lost third place in Group 4 to American Aaron Schackel (3:45.45), who was in lane one.
There are several possible interpretations. It could be that Kim was not feeling well, or it could be that the other top ranked runners now know his game plan for the early runs and saved it for this event. Even Park Tae-hwan, South Korea’s only Olympic medalist in swimming, who traveled to Paris as a commentator for the broadcasters of the event, said after watching the preliminaries that “Kim Woo-min’s race was a bit awkward,” and cheered for the final.
In that sense, Park’s race at the World Championships 13 years ago is a good reference point for Kim. Park almost crashed out of qualifying after a bad strategy in the preliminaries, but he pulled off a lane one miracle in the final to win gold.
Park’s time of 3:46.74 in the preliminaries was quite low, and he made it to the final with a pull-up. The final was different. He ran his own race from the beginning of the final, as if he didn’t care about the athletes in lanes 2 through 8, and eventually achieved the ‘golden touch’ without any other athletes catching up. His time of 3:42.04 was good enough to qualify for a medal at the Paris Olympics. World record holder Paul Biedermann (GER), who was the bronze medalist at the time, admitted, “I thought it would be difficult to catch up with Park Tae-hwan during the race.”
If Kim Woo-min can emulate the kind of race that Park Tae-hwan had, he could pull off a lane 1 miracle that would erase his qualifying disappointment.
Kim ran a personal best of 3:42.42 at the Marais Nostrum in Monaco last month. This is 0.7 to 0.8 seconds behind the world No. 1 Martens’ 3:40.33 at the German trials in April and the world No. 2s Winnington (3:41.41) and Short (3:41.64), but there’s no telling what he can do in the Olympic final as he continues to improve his personal best despite not feeling 100%.
That’s why we’re wondering if Kim will pull off a ‘lane one miracle’.
He promised a different race in the final, telling reporters from Xinhua and other media outlets in the joint press area immediately after qualifying, “I think I can do a better race (in the final than in qualifying) because (my) body is good in the afternoon,” and vowed to “give it my all.”