South Korean handball players will face a tall order at the upcoming London Olympics ― quite literally.
Both the men’s and women’s teams have drawn European teams that prominently feature bigger and taller players. But South Korean coaches and players said they have just the strategy against those teams.
Keep running.
“Those players may be taller, but we’re much faster,” said Kang Jae-won, the head coach of the women’s team. “For about a year, we’ve also worked on defensive formations to use against bigger teams.”
Park Jung-geu, the captain of the men’s squad, said his team will be able to stand its ground later into the match thanks to players’ fitness levels.
“We’re not going to the Olympics thinking we can’t beat those guys,” Park said. “We believe we are faster, more disciplined and better trained than those teams.”
Size and height matter a great deal in handball. On offense, tall players can shoot over outstretched arms of smaller defenders.
On the opposite end of the court, gigantic players can form a virtual human blockade on defense.
And for relatively smallish Asian teams, trying to beat European opponents is as much about mental as physical ― they have to believe that they can go up against those human walls and keep them from scoring at will.
In women’s handball, South Korea has been a perennial overachiever, having won a medal in six of the past seven Olympics.
Players have made up for their lack of size with grit, almost unparalleled endurance and flair for the dramatic. The undersized team’s silver medal-winning performance at the 2004 Athens Games was the subject of the 2008 hit local film, titled “Forever the Moment.”
The women’s unit will be hard pressed to add another medal to the nation’s total this year. It has drawn Norway, Denmark, France, Spain and Sweden. South Korea, at No. 8 in the International Handball Federation’s world rankings, has the third-highest ranking in the group. But at last year’s world championships, Norway, France, Spain and Denmark finished first through fourth. South Korea was 11th.
According to the Korea Handball Federation, the average height of the South Korean women’s team is 173.2 centimeters. Norway, Spain and Denmark have more than a handful of players at 180 cm or above. (Yonhap News)
