Ye Shiwen
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| National team |
 China
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| Born |
March 1, 1996 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China |
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| Height | 1.72 m (5 ft 8 in) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight | 64 kg (141 lb) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Sport | Swimming | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Strokes | Individual Medley | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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| Ye Shiwen | |||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 叶诗文 | ||||||||
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| Traditional Chinese | 葉詩文 | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Yè Shīwén |
| IPA | [i̯ɛ̂ ʂíu̯ə̌n] |
Ye Shiwen (born March 1, 1996) is a Chinese swimmer. At the 2012 Summer Olympics, she won gold medals in the 400 metres and 200 metres individual medley, breaking the world record in the 400 m event and the Olympic record in the 200 m event.
Ye Shiwen was born in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China. Her father Ye Qingsong was a runner in his youth, and her mother Ning Yiqing, who was a champion long jumper at school, works for a washing machine company. She started swimming at the age of six after her kindergarten teacher noticed she had large hands and feet, joining the Chen Jinglun Sport School in the city. She won the 50m freestyle at the 2006 Zhejiang Provincial Games. She was on the provincial swimming team by 2007 and the Chinese national team by 2008, attending the national junior training camp for two months beginning from October of that year.
She trained in Brisbane, Australia with two world-class coaches, Ken Wood and Denis Cotterell, training that Ye described as "really harsh … but helpful". Her coach Xu Guoyi stated in 2011 that the training in Australia had helped Ye improve her two weaker swimming strokes, with her strengths being the backstroke and the freestyle.
Aged just 14, Ye swam 4:33.79 in the Women's 400m individual medley at the 2010 Asian Games. She swam 2.09.37 in the 200m individual medley (IM), the fastest time in the world for that year, her time for the 400m IM being the second fastest time in the world for that year. At the 2011 World Aquatics Championships in Shanghai, Ye beat both Alicia Coutts and Ariana Kukors to win the gold medal in 200m individual medley.
At the 2012 Summer Olympics, in the third heat of the Women's 400m individual medley she swam 4:31.73, an improvement of two seconds over her previous best time at the 2010 Asian Games. In the final she won the gold medal and broke the world record (held by Stephanie Rice since the 2008 Summer Olympics) with a time of 4:28.43, an improvement of a further three seconds, swimming the last 50m in 28.93 seconds. Ye's time over the final 50m was compared to that of Ryan Lochte, the winner of the corresponding men's event, who swam it just under a fifth of a second slower in 29.10. This prompted allegations of doping against Ye. However, commentators pointed out that these two times were misleading. Lochte's overall time was 23.25 seconds faster, 4:05.18, than Ye's, and the times of all eight finalists in the men's 400m IM were at least 10 seconds faster than Ye's time. When Lochte hit the freestyle leg of the race, he had a comfortable lead over his opponents, whereas Ye was still a body length behind U.S. swimmer Elizabeth Beisel at that point in her race. Phil Lutton, sports editor of the Brisbane Times, observed that Ye "had to hit the burners to motor past Beisel". Data analysis of performances of 2,600 swimmers by two University of Kansas researchers does not find Ye's improvement unusual.
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