
Park Hye-jung (21-Goyang City Hall) won a prized silver medal on the final day of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with a Korean record-breaking performance. Dedicating the silver medal to her mother, Nam Hyun-hee, who passed away in April, Park flashed the world’s biggest smile from the second highest spot on the podium, saying, “My mom, Hye-jung, did it.”
Park Hye-jung lifted 131 kilograms in the uplift, 168 kilograms in the snatch, and 299 kilograms in total in the women’s 81-kilogram overweight category at the World Weightlifting Championships at Arena 6 in South Paris, Paris, France, on Nov. 11 (KST). She broke the South Korean record of 296 kilograms by three kilograms, marking a successful end to her first Olympic Games.
South Korean weightlifting didn’t win a single medal at Tokyo 2020. This time around, however, there was a lot of speculation that they would win at least one medal. Park Hye-jung, a gold medalist at last year’s Asian Games in Hangzhou, will be competing in the women’s 81-kilogram overweight category.
The Olympics is a stage that can make even the biggest stars tremble, but that didn’t seem to be the case for Park, who has always been strong on the big stage. She set a new record that will go down in Korean weightlifting history, becoming the first Korean athlete to stand on the Olympic podium in eight years since Yoon Jin-hee (bronze) at Rio de Janeiro 2016.
Park was inspired to take up weightlifting in the sixth grade after watching a video of Jang Jang-ran competing, and her success in middle school and high school earned her the nickname “the next Jang Jang-ran.
It wasn’t without its challenges. Park felt the pressure of being compared to Korean weightlifting legend Jang Jang-ran and went through a brief slump. But she never gave up. After winning a gold medal at the Asian Games in Hangzhou last year, she regained her confidence and pushed herself to the next level. Taking the phrase “you can achieve anything with hard work” to heart, she trained intensely for the Games, starting at 5:30 a.m. and ending late at 사설 토토사이트 night. With calluses on both palms, he often lifted more than 4,000 kilograms a day.
Although she lost the gold medal to Li Wenyuan (China – 309kg total), Park dedicated her Olympic silver to her mother, Nam Hyun-hee, who passed away in April after an eight-year battle with cancer. Her mother, a former discus thrower in track and field, had been a rock in Park’s development as a weightlifter who was recognized beyond South Korea.
“I tried not to think about her as much as possible until after the Olympics because I thought it would shake me up, but I couldn’t help but think of her,” Park said. “If she were alive, I think she would have hugged me. I will show her my medal when I get back to Korea,” she said.
Seong became the first Asian woman to win an Olympic medal in modern pentathlon. In the women’s pentathlon final on the same day at the modern pentathlon stadium at the Palace of Versailles in France, Seong scored a total of 1,441 points in fencing, equestrian, swimming, and laser run (athletics plus shooting). The bronze medal was just as valuable as the gold, and the Korean athlete made history in women’s modern pentathlon.
Seong, who finished eighth in the fencing ranking round on Aug. 8 with 225 points after accumulating 20 wins, earned a perfect score of 300 points in the equestrian event with no deductions, putting her in third place in the medal standings (525 points). In the bonus round, where the bottom two finishers from the fencing ranking rounds move up in a “survival” fashion for extra points, Sung was defeated by Elena MICELLI (ITA) and dropped to fifth place (525 points). However, the former swimmer bounced back to third place (813 points) with a time of 2:11.47, good enough for second overall. In the laser run, which staggered starts based on the results of the previous events, Sung started 31 seconds behind the leaders and never faltered, crossing the finish line in third place.