Lee has shot at being Korea's greatest ever

By Kim Tong-hyung

After speed skater Lee Sang-hwa extended her reign of terror in the women’s 500-meter sprint and ensured that Korea’s first medal in the Sochi Olympics would be gold, you could almost hear Korean sports officials heaving a collective sigh of relief.

Before Lee’s triumph, Korea had been shut out from the podium in the first three days of Olympic action, its speed skaters steamrolled by the mighty Dutch and its short-track skaters bumbling out of contention.

In sending a record 71 athletes to Sochi, the country had been aiming at a historic medal haul in a stage it sees as the build-up to its own Olympics scheduled for the sleepy resort town of PyeongChang in 2018.

It seems such ambitions have already been damaged irrevocably. Speed skaters Mo Tae-bum and Lee Seung-hoon, who combined for four medals in Vancouver, were victimized by the Netherlands’ domination of speed-skating events that is quickly becoming historic. Sin Da-woon was expected to contend in the men’s 1,500-meter short-track speed skating competition, but then crashed out in the semifinal.

Of course, medals aren’t everything. But it’s also certain that people will never quit grousing about the number of medals their Olympic team is winning, especially not in Korea where the link between sports and nationalism remains profound.

If Lee hadn’t topped the 500-meter final at the Adler Arena Skating Center, we would have witnessed the spectacle of sports figureheads jumping up and down on the panic button.

Kim Yu-na defending her Olympic title in women’s figure skating no longer feels like a safe prediction with the emergence of 15-year-old Russian prodigy Yulia Lipnitskaya who just laid waste to the field in the team event. High-school girl Shim Suk-hee is Korea’s biggest hope in short-track speed skating, but the competition seems too close for her to be declared a surefire gold-medal candidate.

If ever the winner of an event can be deemed a foregone conclusion, it was Lee in the 500 meters. She had won all seven World Cup events she entered this season and broke the world record four different times during that span, trimming the mark from 36.80 to 36.36 seconds.

In defending her 500-meter gold and setting a new Olympic record in doing it, Lee cemented her status as one of the greatest skaters of this generation. The only upset was that she wasn’t Dutch.

Lee led after the first run and her second-run of 37.28 seconds gave her a combined time of 74.70 seconds, shattering the previous Olympic mark of 74.75 seconds set by Canada’s Catriona Le May Doan at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. Russia’s Olga Fatkulina, who took the silver with an aggregate time of 75.06 seconds, compared Lee to Usain Bolt.

``There were times when I questioned whether I could win back-to-back Olympic golds. It feels great that I did it,’’ Lee told reporters after the race.

``Winning the Olympic is a different feeling than breaking the world record. There are a lot of things that can happen in the Olympics, so while I always said I was confident about a repeat, I also tried hard not to let the pressure get to me… There were people who said my gold medal in Vancouver was a fluke and I was motivated to prove them wrong.’’

At the age of 24, Lee seems to be entering her prime as an athlete, dominating the women’s sprint competition with an authority only few have ever displayed. It’s hard to believe now that she had barely been a bronze-medal candidate heading into the Vancouver Games.

Lee has already secured her place in the pantheon of Korean sporting heroes and rivals Kim, the figure-skating megastar, as the country’s most transcendent sporting figures.

While Kim has made it clear she will retire from competitive skating after the Sochi Olympics, Lee plans to compete in the 2018 PyeongChang Games and possibly the 2022 Games. She already seems well-progressed in her quest on becoming Korea’s greatest Olympian ever.