by sportswriters Wang Qi, Zhang Zewei and Na Yuqi
DAKAR, Nov. 7 — Sporting her fresh silver medal, South Korea’s 16-year-old swimmer Kim Seung-won fished out her phone in the mixed zone while being asked to reflect on her unique journey at the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games.
“I want to say something. I wrote it here. Can I see that, please? This is in Korean, but I will translate it.”
On Thursday, Kim earned silver in the 50m backstroke as the lone Asian finalist. Gold medalist Daria-Mariuca Silisteanu of Romania and third-place finisher Cecilia Dieleke of Argentina joined Kim on the podium, matching the exact top-three result of the 100m backstroke.
As her once-in-a-lifetime YOG campaign culminated in another medal, Kim shared a pre-written note, opening up about her long road back from an injury that nearly ended her career.
“At the beginning of this year, I suffered lower-body paralysis during training. I couldn’t even walk, and my doctors, coaches, and parents all told me to quit swimming,” Kim read, her eyes fixed on the screen. “I knew there was a chance I could become paralyzed again.”
Kim, born in January 2010, is now a first-year student at Gyeonggi Physical Education High School.
Standing 1.71 meters tall, the ever-smiling teenager has already made a huge splash in the sport. She broke the national record in the women’s 50m backstroke in March 2024 with a time of 28.00 seconds, before lowering it to 27.84 two months later.
Since earning her first national team call-up in 2023, she has tested herself on the international stage, measuring her progress against the world’s best senior swimmers.
By December 2025, her trajectory seemed unstoppable after a sweeping hat-trick of golds in the 50m, 100m, and 200m backstroke at the Queensland Championships.
Immediately following that triumph, however, her competitive log fell into a sudden, prolonged hiatus.
According to an interview released by Olympics.com ahead of the Dakar YOG, her back injury was “at its worst” during the Asian Games trials in late March, which almost shattered her hope of making it to Aichi-Nagoya 2026.
She spoke to reporters in the mixed zone of that dark, injury-plagued stretch — a period when she was unable to walk for two months and had to step away from the pool for about four months.
“My doctors said that I can’t swim anymore, 100 percent,” Kim recalled. “Everyone told me you can’t swim anymore, you can’t walk anymore. Of course, it’s something I worried about (too). It was a hard time.”
Yet she refused to surrender the sport that had anchored her life since childhood, as Kim shared in her note.
“Swimming meant so much to me that I decided to take the risk and find one more chance after months of rehabilitation and a lot of hard work. If I had given up back then, I wouldn’t be here,” her note continued.
The South Korean started swimming at the age of nine. “And then in my entire life, I’m doing the sport. Swimming is my life, so I can’t give up easily,” she told Xinhua.
Kim did not go into detail about the hardships she had endured during rehabilitation, saying only: “I just wanted to believe in myself and my abilities, and I didn’t want to hear about what I possibly couldn’t do.”
But every tentative step back toward the water bore quiet witness to her stubborn commitment to swimming.
In September, Kim made history on her Asian Games debut at Aichi-Nagoya 2026, winning bronze in the women’s 50m backstroke to become the first South Korean swimmer to medal in the event at the Games.
She also claimed three more bronze medals in the women’s 100m backstroke, the mixed 4x100m medley relay and the women’s 4x100m medley relay.
Just a month later, Kim landed in Dakar with barely a break, upgrading her previous bronze-medal performances in the 50m and 100m backstroke into a pair of silvers.
On a sizzling Tuesday, fresh off clinching her medal in the 100m backstroke, Kim was spotted in the stands after the podium ceremony, posing for a photo with China’s Chang Mohan.
Though the two swimmers had previously crossed paths at the Asian Games, they remained little more than acquaintances at the time.
“There aren’t a lot of Asian athletes here, so we were like, ‘You’re Asian? I’m Asian too!’ We are getting closer in this competition,” Kim told Xinhua, breaking into a smile.
Towards the end of her note, Kim wrote: “I believe this challenge will become a stepping stone that helps me overcome the difficulties I may face in the future.”
From being unable to walk at the start of the year to claiming silver in Dakar, the rising backstroke talent has already set her sights on gold for her next chapter.
“Truthfully, I want to get a gold medal here because I tried it really hard. But I got two silver medals. That makes my boost to get a gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympic Games,” she added. (Namibia Daily News/Xinhua)
