South Korea’s Park Tae Hwan is now the National Record holder in the 100 free, the 200 free, the 400 free, the 800 free, the 1500 free….and the 200 IM in a long course pool.
That’s after swimming a 2:00.31 in the men’s 200 IM final on Thursday to win running away. It breaks the old record of 2:00.41 set by Kim Mingyu in 2009, and puts Park within reach of being the first South Korean to break two minutes in this race at the Asiad later this year.
Park said coming into this meet that one of his goals was to medal in the 200 IM as the Asian Games, which will be a very tall task. His time from here at Nationals would’ve earned bronze in 2010, and while he’ll surely improve off of that, the Chinese and the Japanese IM’ers are much better than they were four years ago.
Park also anchored Incheon’s winning 800 free relay of 7:24.65, which was a Meet Record. No splits for that swim were available in official results.
Park’s swim was the leader, but overall this was a fantastic day for the country – with all event winners qualifying for the Asian Games. Out of 7 senior-level finals on the day, only a single event didn’t see at least a Meet Record.
That includes in the women’s IM Choi Hye-Ra, who won in a 2:14.45 ahead of the 2:15.33 from Kim Seo Yeong. Although Cho was the winner here, Kim is three years her junior and is much more of an IM specialist than Choi, who divides her time with the butterflies. If Kim can spend the next two years working on really developing a specialty stroke, some sort of an anchor to her IM, then she could be in Rio on the South Korean Olympic team.
In the women’s 800 free, the new Meet Record went to Han na Keyong in 8:54.46 – the first of just two events she’ll compete at this meet.
In the men’s 100 backstroke, Park Seon-Kwan won in 55.20 – a significant improvement over his 4th-seeded 57.18 in the 100 back in prelims. That beat out the swim of teenager Lim Tae Jung (56.12), who scratched the 200 IM final to focus on this race, but to no avail.
Park will be back in action on Friday in the men’s 100 free; he’ll then have a day off before heading into a treacherous 1500 free/400IM scheduled double on the last day of the meet.