Vietnamese swimming talent Hoang Quy Phuoc said he would have achieved better results in his swimming career had he been given a proper training plan in the last four years.

He expressed the regret in a recent interview with Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper in Hanoi, where he is undergoing treatment for his back injury at Vietnam Sports Hospital.

Now at the age of 22, Phuoc said he has worked with many different coaches, one after another, and that has prevented him from benefiting from a consistent training method.

The swimmer rose to fame in 2010, when he won nine gold medals and broke nine national records at the National Sports Festival held in the central city of Da Nang.

At the 26th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Indonesia in 2011, he won two gold medals in the men’s 100m freestyle and 100m butterfly events.

In 53.07 seconds, he broke the SEA Games record in the men’s 100m butterfly and bettered the result of Joseph Schooling, now a rising star in Singapore.

Phuoc was the first Vietnamese swimmer to gain these results in regional tournaments.

After that, sports authorities in Da Nang and the General Department of Sports and Physical Training approved a plan to send him to a training course in the U.S. in early 2012.

But the two Vietnamese coaches leading a team of five swimmers got into a deep disagreement and Phuoc had to return home early.

He was later sent to Australia, China, and Japan for training with different coaches and he failed to get better achievements.

Nguyen Hong Minh, head of the Vietnamese sports delegation at different tournaments abroad, said, “I can confirm that Hoang Quy Phuoc is a rare swimming talent of Vietnam but we have caused him to fail due to our inconsistent plan for his training.”

Athletes for elite competitions must be trained in a systematic and consistent manner for long-term development, he added.

As an elite swimmer, Phuoc said he had to cook himself and was given no guidance on nutrition.

Now, he is renting a hotel room in Hanoi for his back injury treatment that is expected to last for two weeks.

He said he has suffered from that injury for years but pain has only erupted this year.

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