LIMTIACO Tasi

General
RETIREMENT THOUGHTS
He considered giving up swimming after the postponement of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. "I was in a rough place, unsure whether I should keep going or stop and get a stable job. A lot of us were in a low place, but our coaches brought us back up. The Olympics has been a dream since I was eight years old and it is something I have been chasing for too long just to give up because it was delayed a year." He had previously taken a two-year break from swimming in 2016. Born in the Federated States of Micronesia, he moved to Guam as a child and competed for Tsunami Swim Club before moving to Kofu, Japan, to study and swim at Yamanashi Gakuin University. But, after he finished university, he returned to Guam to coach swimming at Tsunami Swim Club and stopped competing in the sport before making a return in 2018. "I was out of the water for a couple of years, unsure if I wanted to continue or not. For Micronesia and Guam, the level of sports is not high compared to other countries such as Japan and Australia. You do not have many Pacific Islanders swimming, which is funny because we are surrounded by water. So it makes me proud to put Guam and the Federated States of Micronesia on the map. When I jumped into the water, I wondered if I would ever get back to the standard I was before. But something that motivated me to dive back in was to create new opportunities for the younger generation to better themselves." (Instagram profile, 23 Jun 2021; guampdn.com, 15 Oct 2020)