Sun Yang biography
Sun Yang, At the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Chinese distance specialist Sun Yang was one among solely two male swimmers to seize two particular person gold medals. (The different was American Michael Phelps.) When Sun arrived in London, he had already racked up some spectacular credentials because the Asian-record holder within the 400-, 800-, and 1,500-m freestyle and because the first Chinese man in additional than 50 years to set a swimming world document in a textile (non-high-tech) swimsuit. Significantly—and in contrast to a number of feminine Chinese swimmers, together with his 2012 Olympic teammate Ye Shiwen—he did it with out arousing suspicions of doping.
Sun started swimming on the nationwide stage in 2006 and was a member of China’s workforce on the 2007 FINA world championships in Melbourne. His actual debut on the world stage got here on the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the place he positioned eighth within the 1,500-m freestyle and twenty eighth within the 400-m freestyle. The subsequent 12 months, on the world championships in Rome, he moved as much as third within the longer occasion. It was on the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, China, nonetheless, that he revealed his true potential. Buoyed by a boisterous hometown crowd, he stroked to an incredible mark of 14 min 35.43 sec within the 1,500 m—the second quickest time in historical past and fewer than a second behind Australian Grant Hackett’s world document.
One 12 months later, on the world championships in Shanghai, Sun picked up gold medals within the 800 m and 1,500 m, together with a silver within the 400-m freestyle and a bronze within the 4 × 200-m freestyle relay. Significantly, his gold medals included that elusive 1,500-m world document, which Hackett had held for a full decade. It was the game’s solely males’s mark to have survived the document onslaught of the high-tech-suit period, and Sun broke it by 0.42 sec.
Despite having established himself because the prohibitive pre-Olympic favorite within the 1,500-m freestyle, the 1.98-m, 89-kg (6-ft 6-in, 196-lb) teen headed to Australia’s Gold Coast to coach beneath Denis Cotterell, Hackett’s longtime mentor. The transfer paid enormous dividends on the 2012 Games. Sun started with a surprisingly straightforward victory within the 400-m freestyle, the place his time (3 min 40.14 sec)—the third quickest in historical past—was solely 0.07 sec off the world document. It additionally made Sun the primary Chinese man to win Olympic gold in swimming. He then tied for silver within the 200-m freestyle and anchored China’s 4 × 200-m relay squad to its first medal, a bronze. That left the 1,500 m, Sun’s signature occasion. Grabbing the lead at the beginning, Sun was relentless in carving out an 8.61-sec victory. His time of 14 min 31.02 sec shattered his personal world commonplace and made him the primary swimmer since 1980 to take the 400-/1,500-m double.