Joo-ho Lee, 5th place in 200m backstroke at World Championships Korea’s highest ever score

Lee Joo-ho ranked 5th, the highest in Korean swimming history, in the men's 200m backstroke final at the 2024 World Aquatics Championships held in Doha, Qatar, on the 17th. 

“I’m sorry about the overface “All in on the Paris Olympics”

“I am happy and honored to have achieved the best results ever. However, it is unfortunate that I ‘overfaced’ it without realizing it.”

The voice of Joo-ho Lee (29), who finished the men's 200m backstroke final race at the 2024 World Aquatics Championships held in Doha, Qatar on the 17th, contained joy and regret. On this day, Lee Ju-ho ranked 5th among the 8 finalists with a time of 1 minute 56.38 seconds. At this year's Doha Games, Lee Joo-ho became the first Korean backstroker to reach the finals and achieved his best performance ever.

Lee Joo-ho, who ranked 3rd overall in the semifinals and stood in lane 3 of the finals, started the fastest among the eight participants (reaction time 0.54 seconds) and finished second with a time of 26.76 seconds in the first 50m section. So far, all management medals from the World Aquatics Championships have come from the freestyle category, but the first medal in the 'non-freestyle' category was expected. However, he failed to show his strength after falling to 5th place in the 100m section. He was 0.33 seconds slower than the Korean record of 1:56.05 that he set three months ago.

It was in the first 50m section that Lee Joo-ho mentioned over-pace. When Lee Joo-ho set a Korean record at the national team selection event last November, his first 50m record was 27.37 seconds. He beat his first 50m time by 0.61 seconds on the day of the World Aquatics Championships finals. It was overfaced. Due to fatigue caused by using more strength than usual in the beginning, Lee Joo-ho was unable to exert his strength properly while the other players showed their strength. When he passed 100m and reached 150m, Lee Joo-ho's section record exceeded 30 seconds (30.05 seconds).

Lee Joo-ho said, “I was lucky in the semifinals and took third place (1 minute 56.40 seconds). However, the competition was so intense that most of the finalists' records were in the '1 minute and 56 seconds' range. In the finals (without being impatient), I thought, ‘I should tread lightly…’ “Even though I thought that, I think I gained strength without even realizing it,” he said.

When each athlete trains, he or she sets a target record for each section in order to understand his or her condition and evenly distribute strength, and then trains repeatedly countless times to achieve this record. When competing in domestic competitions, he sometimes gives commands to let leaders know if they are going at their own pace. However, in international competitions where spectators are crowded, the leader's commands are not given, so the athletes run the race based on their own calculations. If you are in good condition on the day of the competition and achieve a record that is evenly above the target in all sections, or if you exceed the target in the last section where you need to exert all your strength, a personal best record may be achieved.

However, if the race is too fast compared to the target time at the beginning of the race, both the athlete and the officials express it as overpacing. If you overpace, you often end up losing strength in the second half of the race and your record is worse than usual. A domestic coach says, “If there is an over-pace, in the final section where the last effort must be exerted, the athlete becomes embarrassed and breaks down psychologically because his body does not listen to him.”

Hwang Sun-woo (21) at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics also suffered from this overface when he was competing in his first international individual competition. In the Olympic 200m freestyle finals, Hwang Sun-woo, who ran the first 100m section at a pace that seemed likely to break the world record, later lost strength in the 150m section and was pushed down from 1st to 7th place. Afterwards, Hwang Seon-woo said, “I started to become aware of my surroundings around the 150m mark. (I am the fastest) It seemed like there was no one next to me. “He was embarrassed for a moment and his rhythm was broken,” he once said.

Lee Joo-ho is smiling brightly at the electronic display after finishing second in the men's 200m backstroke final at the Hangzhou Asian Games in September last year. 

Lee Joo-ho, 29 years old, previously participated in the Olympics once and the Asian Games twice. At the Asian Games so far, she has won two silver medals and four bronze medals. This is the fourth World Aquatics Championships. Lee Joo-ho, who set his first Korean record in 2017 when he was 22 years old, broke the unwritten rule that 'you break after your mid-20s' by breaking his own Korean record again last year. A World Championships medal would have been possible if he had beaten his own Korean record, set just three months earlier, by just 0.07 seconds. The records of the men's 200m backstroke winners at this year's World Aquatics Championships are all in the 1 minute 55 seconds, and the record of South Africa's Peter Kuche (20), who came in third, is 1 minute 55.99 seconds.

Lee Joo-ho, who had never made it to the finals of the Olympics or the World Aquatics Championships and this was his first final, said it was a 'valuable experience.' Lee Joo-ho said, “It is said that this is a competition where some key players are missing (due to preparations for the Paris Olympics), but if you look at the records of the winners, the level does not drop compared to other previous competitions. It was my first time becoming a finalist in such a competition and it motivated me a lot. “I want to write a new history by putting everything on the line at the Paris Olympics, the biggest competition to be held at the end of my 20s,” he said. 스포츠토토맨