Reflection and Refraction
Description
[In which Taemin is training to be an Olympic swimmer while simultaniously dealing with teenage insecurities and a disability caused by a childhood injury.]
Imagine that you are a fish underwater. When you look up to the surface, you can see the sky and also the bottom of the ocean…so what are you actually looking at, and where are you going?
Foreword
Wow look at me being philisophical in the description box!
This is something I wrote for my sister, who has bugged me for the last I-can't-tell-you-how-long about this little plot bunny half-inspired by the "Dive" series by Gordon Korman, who was one of my favorite authors when i was a child, and half inspired by my own nostalgia for competative swimming.
[TL;DR:
Event times are read as Minutes:Seconds.Milliseconds.
South Korea currently holds 2 Medals in Olympic swimming- Gold in the 400 m freestyle (8 laps) and Silver the 200 m freestyle (4 laps), both by Park Tae-Hwan in the 2008 games when he was 19. His times were 3:41.86 and 1:44.85 respectively. In comparison the country holds 12 medals in Paralympic Swimming – 3 gold, 5 silver, 4 bronze.
Olympic pools are “long course”- meaning they measure 50 meters; most competition pools are 25 meters. Eight laps in an Olympic pool is the equivalent to 16 in an ordinary pool you might find in a high school.
In this story, Taemin’s best event is the 200m Individual Medley relay (AKA 200 IM) - that’s 8 laps in an ordinary pool, 2 of each style. In an Olympic pool it’s one lap per style. The order is Butterfly, Back, , and finally freestyle (front crawl). The Olympic record time for this event is 1:54.23, by Michael Phelps. The world record is 1:54 by Ryan Lochte.
The Olympic Qualifying Time for the Men’s 200 meter IM is 2:00.17
It is important to note that as with any race, .23 seconds is all it takes to win or lose; and as in any race, it’s a long time.
It is also important to note that I am not a doctor nor do I know any doctors. In the actual Dive series the girl I base Taemin’s character off of had a mild case of cerebral palsy, which caused her to limp. Taemin isn’t diagnosed with cerebral palsy because the term is used to describe an injury to a child in the womb, during delivery or within 6 months after birth, and Taemin was older when he was injured.
I actually have no idea if Taemin would be able to compete in the Olympic games under its current regulations- mostly because Google search only gets you so far and I don’t understand a lot of what I did find. However his injury is relatively minor- he walks unaided most of the time and he has a qualifying time for the games, so if anything I think it’s reasonable to say the likely course of action would be to sue for the right to compete. If he has a solid sponsor, he’d probably win.]
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