BEIJING– In light of a damaging off-ice scandal and an injury to a key member, South Korea fielded a fairly weak team for the women’s 3,000m relay at Beijing 2022.
The quartet of Choi Min-jeong, Kim A-lang, Lee Yu-bin and Seo Whi-min still grabbed silver medal Sunday at Capital Indoor Stadium, no mean feat given the circumstances. The dominant Netherlands team led by Suzanne Schulting was too much for the compromised South Korean squad to handle.
It’s fair to wonder what South Korea would have been able to accomplish if it had all the top skaters available.
Choi, Kim and Lee were members of the gold medal-winning team at PyeongChang 2018. One integral piece of that squad, Shim Suk-hee, was missing from Beijing for her off-ice trouble.
She received a two-month ban from the Korea Skating Union (KSU) in December for making disparaging and critical comments about her teammates and coaches in obscenity-filled text exchanges with a coach during the PyeongChang Olympics. Choi and Kim were among those ridiculed in those text threads. Once those messages were leaked to the media, Shim, who’d won the national Olympic trials, was immediately cut from the team, and the bridges she had with Choi and Kim were burned.
Kim Ji-yoo, an emerging star who’d finished third in the Olympic trials, was ruled out of the Olympics with an ankle injury. Kim took shots at the KSU for leaving her off the team, as she felt she’d fully recovered, and accused the national federation of lacking transparency in its selection process.
Choi, the ace of the team, had dealt with knee and ankle injuries of her own. Kim had looked a tad slow in the semifinals Wednesday, while Lee had been disappointing in earlier individual races, 500m and 1,000m.
With the country’s relay gold medal winning streak on the line, the team faced an uphill battle against the Netherlands, China and Canada in the final.
South Korea started out slowly, with the Netherlands in the early lead. And the Dutch almost went wire-to-wire, never falling below second place at any point during the 27-lap race.
Choi and Kim made a late push that ultimately fell short. Choi, in particular, tried to anchor the team to an unlikely gold, but Schulting proved too fast.
This was reminiscent of the finish at the 1,000m final from Friday, when Choi tried to catch Schulting toward the end but ran out of room.
South Korea had won the past two relay gold medals and missed out on the title in only 1992 and 2010 before Sunday night.
Source: Yonhap News Agency