INTERVIEW: PARK SUNG-HYUN

The greatest? Park Sung-Hyun once described her archery medals as “gifts I’ve received along with my coach… If anything, I think I’ve had more luck than other people.” But Sung-Hyun dominated archery in the 2000s, taking three gold medals and a silver from the Athens and Beijing Olympics, along with a raft of other titles and a near-mythical world record that still stands.

She competed in an era when the Korean archery team demanded a relentless professionalism that the rest of the world is still only just catching up on, itself an iteration of South Korea’s tough-it-out, quasi-military approach, all the way back in 2008. “They can also think about starting a family and having a private life with someone, but we can’t think about these things. We are archers.”