The blind Olympian Archer from Korea
July 29, 2012 2 Comments
There is a blind athlete competing in archery at the London Olympics.
I watched the archery preliminaries yesterday morning, and he scored 699. According to the announcer, it was like the highest score there. Turns out, it was a new individual world record.
Anyways, I didn’t know that this 699 point guy WAS the blind athlete in question. He didn’t look blind, he wasn”t wearing black glasses (or any glasses for that matter), and there was nothing about him to point him out as the blind guy.
Actually, the only thing strange about him was that he never looked into the telescope to check how his throw was, unlike all the others who immediately looked into the tele to check their arrows. I just thought he so skilled and confident, he didn’t need to check his throw.
The Archer is called Im Dong-Hyon, and he’s from South Korea. He’s already set a new world record at the London Olympics, and already has two Olympics gold medals from 2004 & 2008, as part of Team Korea. AND he’s aiming for an individual one this time.
He only has 10% vision in his left eye and 20% in his right eye, which makes him legally blind. He can’t see the lines and circles he’s supposed to hit with his arrows, he can only see the blurred colors. He says he aims at the “Bright Yellow Blub”.
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Wow!!! Mahsallah that is amazing!
By the way, it’s funny but his poor vision might be helping him in this case! I’ll explain – I have really bad vision, so when I take off my glasses the tiny green/red on/off dot from the tv becomes really big
I guess in his case the target circle becomes really big so he has a larger target to aim at 