Can You Heal Olympic Heartbreak With Belated Medals?
When Jeon Sang-guen’s barbell fell from his hands at the London Olympics, he knew everything was about to change. There would be no medal. No joyous celebration. His career in weight lifting, he knew in that moment, was probably over.
Except, it turns out, it wasn’t.
In April, Jeon was working at his desk at South Korea’s state-run currency maker when his phone rang. The voice on the other end delivered stunning news: The Russian who had finished ahead of him in London had been disqualified for a doping violation. Nearly 12 years after his crushing disappointment, the International Olympic Committee would be awarding Jeon the bronze medal after all.
“It felt ecstatic for a moment,” Jeon, 43, said in his office in the southeastern city of Gyeongsan. And then he went right back to work. “I had other responsibilities,” he said.
The reallocated medal, Jeon knew, could not undo the fact that his bitter fourth-place finish had altered the course of his life. He had returned home and taken a desk job. He had moved on.
But this spring, as he processed the news of his belated achievement, Jeon said it rekindled a dream that he previously thought was unattainable: to become a coach.
The bronze medal, which Jeon will receive during a ceremony at the Paris Olympics on Friday, is one of more than 160 Olympic medals that have been reallocated or withdrawn since drug testing began in 1968. The ceremony will belatedly recognize 10 athletes — runners, jumpers and lifters — who competed in London.
That will come two days after a separate ceremony to reallocate the medals from team figure skating at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. The United States will now receive the gold, more than two years after a Russian skater was disqualified after she tested positive for a banned substance.
Past reallocations have brought joy to athletes, but the experiences are often bittersweet, sometimes arriving years after the athletes have retired from competition and remade their lives permanently.
The medal will not change the fact that Jeon left weight lifting behind years ago. He briefly worked as a coach after returning from London in 2012. But the team was disbanded as part of budget cuts two years later. The only way he saw to support his family was to take an office job.
“I was afraid to start something I had never done in the more than 30 years of my life,” he said. “I just gritted my teeth and worked.”
Life was different after London, he said. The misery was compounded when his younger sister died of breast cancer in 2016. His routine, after that, looked nothing like his athletic days: work, drink, sleep, repeat.
Gone was a passion for lifting that he had nurtured since middle school at the suggestion of a coach who recognized his physical heft. He had attended a top sports university in Seoul. He had joined corporate weight lifting teams, common in South Korea, and ended up on the team owned by the Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation.
And after years of relentless training, he became an Olympian, qualifying to compete at the 2008 Games in Beijing. But in China, he failed to perform a full lift.
He considered quitting the sport then, he said, “but when I told my mother I wanted to quit, she said, ‘If an athlete goes to the Olympics, shouldn’t he win a medal?’” So he pressed on, capturing a bronze medal at the world championships in 2011.
His sights were set on an Olympic medal in London, where he finished having lifted 961 pounds in total. But the Russian lifter, Ruslan Albegov, surged ahead to seize the bronze.
“If he had won the medal then, I think it would have boosted the morale among other weight lifters here,” said Chae Yongki, a coach who went to school with Jeon. “But I don’t know how much of an impact the medal has now that it’s been so long since he competed.”
Jeon quit competing, but the sport did not fully relinquish its grip on his life. His wife is a weight lifting coach. Their younger child, 17-year-old Jeon Heesoo, started lifting weights in elementary school and was soon winning national championships, lifting more than one and a half times her body weight. In June, she broke the national record for students in her weight group, women’s 76 kilograms (about 168 pounds).
All the while, something else gnawed at him: Albegov’s surprise performance. “A Russian athlete I had never seen before suddenly entered the competition,” Jeon recalled. “I wondered how he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.”
Suspicions swirled, fueled by Russia’s record of disqualifications and by revelations several years later of a state-run doping scheme. Drugs also plagued the highest levels of weight lifting, which prompted Olympic leaders to threaten to drop the sport in 2021.
Jeon’s suspicions were vindicated. The International Weightlifting Federation suspended Albegov in 2017, charging him with doping. In March, the International Olympic Committee announced that it would strip him of the bronze medal from London. And on that day in April when Jeon picked up his phone at work, the Korea Weightlifting Federation was calling to tell him that he would receive the medal.
The International Olympic Committee has said that it will hold a medal-reallocation ceremony for Jeon and nine other athletes on Aug. 9 at the Trocadéro Gardens at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
While Jeon felt wistful over the belated recognition, he also cited gains from his regular job. He said that the work was satisfying because it involved making products that guarded against fraud and that he was proud to have become confident in a skill that was previously alien to him.
“A lot of athletes are intimidated by the thought of leaving sports,” he said. “I want to tell them that I’m doing well in my life after weight lifting.”
He said he also had a better understanding of the politics of the company, which he hoped would revive the weight lifting team of which he was once a member. The company said in a statement that it would “thoroughly review the necessity of reviving the weight lifting team.”
If it did, Jeon said, he would apply to be its coach. Otherwise, he felt, he was wasting his knowledge and experience.
“It’s time for me to chase my dreams, too,” Jeon said over the sounds of grunts and falling weight plates as his daughter trained.
Heesoo said her goal was to win an Olympic gold medal.
“I want her to be better than me,” Jeon said.
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