Olympic swim champ Zhang Yufei: just looking at pool made me feel sick, now ‘I’m back’
Zhang Yufei took five-month break to decide if she wanted to continue in the sport, but is now eyeing a place at 2028 LA Olympics
Olympic champion Zhang Yufei has opened up about how looking at the pool made her feel physically sick, and she took a five-month break from swimming to decide if she even wanted to continue in the sport.
But in a post on RedNote on Monday, the double Tokyo Games gold medallist announced, “I’m back”, and said she had set her sights on the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
To mark her return, Zhang competed in the 100m butterfly at the Chinese Spring National Championships in Qingdao on Sunday, finishing fifth in 58.12 seconds.
“Yes, I’m back [and] I’m very happy to be back in the pool,” she said. “After a half-year absence, the last month of training has made me feel different.
“When I took part in the World Cup last October, I got a kind of sickness, the type that made me want to vomit when I looked at the pool. It sounds ridiculous, but that was my true feeling at that time, I was even a little glad that I was injured so that I could avoid the pool: out of sight, out of mind.”
The 26-year-old said that for the past five months she had not gone near a swimming pool, except for the weeks of training she did to prepare for the spring championships.