17th Asian Games (2014)
Eleven Gold Medals
The DPRK contingent in the 17th Asian Games returned home on October 5.
Pyongyang citizens, young and old, men and women all alike, turned out to give hero’s welcome to the athletes who brought glory to their homeland.
The Games drew sportspersons from many Asian countries and regions. The DPRK athletes won 36 medals including 11 golds by employing Juche-oriented tactics and displaying team spirit, strong grit and fortitude.
In particular, female footballers, full of grit, played every game from the preliminaries with well-organized offence and defence and high speed, and reached the finals to win Japan 3-1, thus standing on the winners’ podium.
Weightlifters won four golds.
Om Yun Chol claimed the men’s 56 kg title by jerking 170 kg, three times heavier than his weight, thus renewing the world record he had made last year. Other weightlifters also renewed Asian Games, Asian and world records in the men’s 62 kg snatch and established a new world record in the women’s 75 kg jerk, thereby resetting the record at the Games in total points.
Gold medals were won also in the table tennis mixed doubles, women’s vaulting horse and balance beam, men’s 57 kg freestyle wrestling, men’s individual 10-m moving target mixed shooting and women’s 75 kg boxing. The winners flew the DPRK flag, drawing the world’s interests and attention.
Yearning for their supreme leader Kim Jong Un and the determination to send him report of only victory were a source of their strength which enabled them to go beyond the limit of their physical power and push themselves to the winners’ podium at the Games.
Reporting on the news of the victory of the DPRK women’s football team, the mass media from different countries commented that they had repaid the affection of their supreme leader
Kim Jong Un for them with gold medals.
A south Korean media said: Weightlifters from the DPRK renewed a series of world records to snatch gold medals; several new world records were created four days after the opening of the Games and their creators were the north Korean weightlifters who boasted of being the strongest in the world.
The triumph of the DPRK athletes was a landmark event of exalting the dignity and honour of Songun Korea leaping to a sports power, and also a great encouragement to its service personnel and people who have turned out to build a thriving nation in the flames of creating a Korean speed.
Article: Mun Jin Mi (Naenara/Korea Pictorial, 12/2014)
Photos: Korea Today, 12/2014