Gold Medal Is Not Reserved for Every Person

People’s Athlete Kim Chun Phil, a coach of women’s artistic gymnastics at the Pyongyang Sports Club, has trained two world-famous gymnasts.

During her career as an athlete, she failed to win a gold medal in the international competitions. She began to work as a coach with deep regret about this.

Like other coaches, she set about her work with selecting girls with suitable physical constitutions for artistic gymnastics.

While training the girls with suitable physical constitution she had brought to the club, she began to understand the mental agony of other coaches.

Some of them were weak in their will and gave up halfway, and others showed poor results compared to their high enthusiasm.

She visited her former coach Han Chun Hui and other seniors who had worked as coaches in the artistic gymnastics circles for a long time. In the course of learning from their good experience, she realized that she could emerge successful only when she had their own criteria for selecting gymnasts and methods of training them.

Through her career as a gymnast, she had been well aware of the fact that a gymnast must create movements with a high degree of difficulty that suit the physical constitutions of the Korean people if he or she wants to be a world champion, and that gymnasts can perform with credit any movements desired by their coaches only when they keep step with each other.

While creating one movement after another in consideration of the constitutional characteristics of gymnasts, she focused her effort on ensuring that they give full play to their abilities based on their comprehension of performing movements.

Finally, her devoted efforts bore good fruit; Kim Kwang Suk bagged a gold medal in the 26th World Gymnastics Championships held in the US in Juche 80 (1991) by performing thrilling movements named after her in the event of asymmetric bars.

Later, Hong Un Jong took the first place in the women’s vaulting horse event at the 29th Olympic Games held in Beijing in Juche 97 (2008).

“I left home for the sports club at a young age,” said Hong, “but I immersed myself in training without feeling lonely or sad. It was thanks to my coaches who took warm care of and led me as if I was their own sister that I became a winner of the Kim Il Sung Youth Honour Prize and the title of People’s Athlete.”

Kim Chun Phil says, “I have experienced for three times the agony of defeat while training world-famous gymnasts. It was an outcome of my subjective desire for gold medals. Gold medals cannot be won only with the coach’s individual desire. That is why I attach particular importance to this point in raising reserve coaches.”