South Korea Women

South Korea's women last reached an Olympic semi-final in 2012, finishing fourth, then slipped to fifth in Rio and Tokyo — a gap from the years when the team stood on the podium as a matter of course.

The distance from Asian dominance to world contention was covered once, in 1995, when the team won the IHF World Championship. Kim Hyun-mee, named World Player of the Year in 1989, played through the period that built toward that win, and Kim Eun-mi carried the same generation from the 1995 title into an Olympic silver a year later in Atlanta.

Seoul 1988 and Barcelona 1992 gave the team back-to-back Olympic golds, either side of a Los Angeles silver in 1984. Beijing 2008 added a bronze, though the semi-final defeat to Norway there is remembered less for the medal than for how it was lost, a match close enough that it later became the basis for the film Forever the Moment. Lee Min-hee was part of that bronze-medal squad.

The team's first match, in February 1975, ended in a routine win over Taiwan in Daegu. Half a century on, it plays its home fixtures at the SK Olympic Handball Gymnasium in Seoul, a 6,500-seat venue.