Love and hunger

With three gold medals, South Korea is off to a good start at the London Olympics, even after controversies have affected some of its strongest gold medal prospects ― swimmer Park Tae-hwan, judoka Cho Jun-ho and fencer Shin A-lam – in the first few days.

But when on Monday, North Korea ranked above South Korea in the standings with three gold medals, people were busy talking, as they wiped sweat off their faces, that South Korea’s Olympic representatives are no longer “hungry”: that the athletes of Asia’s fourth largest economy are no longer driven by a desire to surmount poverty to achieve the impossible through a “can-do” spirit.

But watching the sweat pour off the South’s competitors, the tension on their faces, we have to admit that we might have been too hasty in judging them.

After winning gold in the men’s 81-kilogram class, South Korean judoka Kim Jae-bum, told of hard he pushed himself both physically and mentally over the past four years. “I played with a do or die spirit in Beijing and I lost. This time I played with the thought that I would die, and this is the result,” Kim said after winning the gold against the same opponent that defeated him at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Okay. That may not exactly be a “hungry” spirit, but a “golden,” indefatigable one.

Perhaps, instead of a “hungry” spirit, the athletes are driven by the love of their sport and the desire to achieve the highest ideal that they’ve been training for. After a flip-flop over a refereeing call, swimming gold medal hopeful Park Tae-hwan brought home silver in his strongest event, the 400-meter freestyle.

Instead of lamenting the loss of a possible gold, fans cheered for Park. He summoned up his will and nerve to bring home a second silver medal, this time in the 200-meter freestyle. Fans stayed up, with many congregating in movie theaters, pubs and sports bars, to wildly cheer “Marine Boy’s” achievement. The swimmer himself looked more cheerful.

Instead of the subdued tearful interview he gave on Saturday (KST) after winning the 400 final, he talked engagingly and honestly with the press after the 200 final Tuesday (KST). He confessed to the press that the last 5 meters was “so hard” and that’s probably why he touched at the same time as China’s Sun Yang to tie for the silver. Park also showed a warm side to his rivalry with Sun, adding that it was nice to have two Asians on the podium for swimming. He demonstrated he was over the disappointment and mature enough to just look forward, earning him more fans and greater respect so that one Korean paper crowned him “Marine King.”

It’s a long way from how the entire nation put its weight behind the 1988 Seoul Olympics to make the games a success and how everybody seemed to identify with gold medalists because Korea was still a growing democracy and an industrial country, one that had come out of colonization and war, still out to prove itself.

The seeming absence of the hungry spirit seems to have been replaced by a mature pursuit of people doing what they enjoy. After earning Korea’s first gold medal in men’s 10-meter air rifle, Jin Jong-oh said “I love shooting.” Within the short time in which Park got his groove back, sports watchers credited him with how much he enjoyed swimming and competing against contenders 10 centimeters taller than him. Let’s hope this groove keeps us going in the days ahead. <The Korea Times>

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