SHINee’s Minho suffered an eye injury after being kicked in the face by another participant during the swimming leg of a triathlon on MBC’s “I Live Alone,” the November 6 episode showed.
According to MyDaily, Minho took on a triathlon in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province — a 1.5-kilometer swim, a 40-kilometer bike ride and a 10-kilometer run — targeting a 2-hour-20-minute finish, with the swim in under 30 minutes and the bike ride in around one hour and 10 minutes.
Trouble came almost immediately. Swimming in a large pack, Minho suddenly stopped mid-stroke after a competitor ahead of him kicked him in the face. “Swimming is a sport where a certain amount of physical contact is allowed,” he explained. “It happens as you go back and forth, so there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Minho said the blow left him fearing the worst. “I got kicked in the face during the race and it felt like I was bleeding,” he said. “Every time I breathed, I checked with my mouth, but the water itself was salty, so I couldn’t tell if it was blood or not.” By the time he reached the transition area, his eye had visibly swollen, and he admitted to host Jeon Hyun-moo, “It swelled a bit after I got hit.”
He kept going anyway, finishing the swim in 26 minutes, inside his target. But the cycling leg brought more problems: heavy rain made the roads slippery, his gears stopped shifting, and his chain came off at the 17.5-kilometer mark, costing him more than a minute to fix. “When the gears don’t shift, your legs have to work so much harder on the climbs,” he said. “That’s when I thought, this is really over.”
Minho is known as one of K-pop’s most dedicated athletes, regularly taking on marathons and endurance events on television. Earlier this year he apologized after a pacemaker controversy at the Seoul Marathon, when questions were raised about whether he had received pacing help during the race. Despite the injury and the mechanical failures, he refused to quit, telling himself, “No excuses, no whining. Just go, Minho.”
No official statement was available on Minho’s eye beyond the broadcast, where the swelling was visible but he continued racing. The episode closed with Minho heading into the final 10-kilometer run determined to claw back the minutes he had lost on the bike.
