Picture of the Day: Failure to Qualify
South Korea’s Park Tae-hwan competes in the men’s 400m freestyle heat during the swimming event at the 31st Summer Olympic Games at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 6, 2016. Park, the 2008 Olympic gold medalist, finished 10th overall in the heats in 3:45.63, missing out on the final, which is open to the top eight qualifiers. (Yonhap)
The shelf life of an Olympic swimmer usually doesn’t last very far past the teen years … so no big surprise here.
Been then this freak named Michael Phelps comes along! 31 years old and still racking up gold medals.
Park is soft and over, next!
To be fair, he hadn’t competed in any competitions for the last 2.5 years due to being banned, first by the Olympic committee, than once again by the Korean Olympic board. This was his first competition since over 2 years ago. Since then, he had to fight the Korean board’s decision to ban him from entering the Olympics after he appealed to the International Olympic committee. He finally won the appeal, and he was allowed to compete for Rio. All that controversy and court battles meant he was in not in great condition, both mentally and physically. He didn’t even have any support from the Korean Olympic organization, and he was on his own to go to Rio. Under those circumstances, this result was not surprising.
I forgot to mention that he was caught taking performance enhancing drug.