Last March, at the team's Spanish training camp, Hiddink said Korea's technical skills was 85% that of advanced soccer playing countries, but their fitness was around 50%. He continued that to remedy this he was instituting a nine-level endurance training program.

Raymond Verhiend a sports physiotherapist with Hiddink in the 1998 World Cup took up the mission with him, in spite of initial complaints by the players that it was too tough. The first objective of the "Power Program" was to increase explosive bursts needed to beat opponents. Lee Young-su, head of the Korea Football Association's technical committee, every 20 meters of full speed sprinting during a game is followed by five seconds of rest, but this cycle is repeated for the entire 90 minutes.

The second plan was to boost recovery power; Hiidink states that 30 minutes into the second half of a game, the decisive factor is how fast a player can recover from exertions and so players wore portable heart monitors to measure how fast their heart rates returned to standing levels after vigorous exercise. Players joining the program late had difficulty adjusting to this regime but were obliged to complete it.

A killing addition to the training was "shuttle running." Major teams in Europe put players through 120 bursts of 20m in a fixed time period, and in the beginning only Lee Chun-soo and Cha Du-ree could do this, while Lee Woon-jae could barely manage 70. However, by May in training on Jeju, most of the players could pass the requirement, with Cha managing 157 and older players such as Hwang Sun-hong and Hong Myong-bo managing 130.

Verhiend said he was surprised at the improvement and began taking the players beyond European standards.

(Chae Sung-jin, dudmie@chosun.com )