陳劍虹

English

Chen Jianhong is head coach of the Hong Kong, China swimming team and of swimming at the Hong Kong Sports Institute, having coached in the territory for more than two decades. Raised in Anhui, where his father coached the provincial team, he entered the provincial squad at fourteen and later joined the Chinese national team. At the 1990 Beijing Asian Games he won the men's 100m breaststroke and set an Asian record in the event, earning him the nickname 'Asia's breaststroke king', and he also competed at the 1994 Asian Games. As an athlete he went to two Olympic Games but never won a medal, which he has called one of the few regrets of his life. After retiring he coached the Shanghai team for two years before being invited to Hong Kong in 2000 by then head coach Chan Yiu-hoi; he later married fellow newcomer Cheung Sim-ying. In his early years he learned Cantonese in three months and fitted training around students' examination schedules, insisting that one should adapt to the environment rather than the other way round. He has developed swimmers such as Cheung Kwok-leung, Chan Yu-ning and Suen Ka-yee, and was named Coach of the Year in 2005 and 2008. At the Tokyo 2020 Olympics he guided Siobhan Haughey to silver medals in the women's 100m and 200m freestyle, Hong Kong's first Olympic swimming medals, and he led the team again at the Hangzhou Asian Games in 2023. He has seen the squad grow from a single 25m pool and about thirty swimmers to more than a hundred athletes with an international-standard training base and welcomes mainland stars such as Li Bingjie, Zhang Yufei and Wang Shun training at the Sports Institute so his swimmers can observe world-class preparation at close range.