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.]