World Junior Champion - Yuna Kim (1)



Yuna won 2005-2006 World Junior Championships

January 2012 is a quite brutal season so far. It's the second term of the first year, and now I serious feel the rapidly growing pressure that the specific goal of my PhD must be decided and the first outcome must be created in a couple of months of time. So, recently there has been no fun since I came back from skiing trip, and there will be no exceiting thing for a while. My life has been occasionally boring like this and probably will be like this from time to time during my PhD study. Yet this blog should be stayed alive. So, I decided to talk about the number one celebrity in South Korea for the last five years, Yuna Kim.

In this world, there are two types of prodigies. Some prodigies shine bright in their early ages, but the great expectation is not continued, and the name is soon forgotten among the public. The other type grows up with  their great talents. The representative super star of the latter case is Yuna Kim. The history of figure skating in South Korea is distinguished by before and after the appearance of Yuna Kim. She is such a super hero!

The weather in South Korea is cold enough in winter to present good background for winter sports such as skiing and skating. For a last decade, South Korea has been quite good in winter olympics due to one specific event, short track. In 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, South Korea was able to sweep gold medals from speed skating and figure skating as well as short track probably thanks to the ambitious project for 2018 winter olympic campaign which was confirmed to be Pyeongchang in South Korea by IOC committee. In fact, ice sports are relatively not restricted by weather condition, so those countries under an equatorial climate still have an opportunity if massive investment could be followed. But when it comes to snow sports, climate and topographic conditions are extremely important, so european countries have significant advantages. In South Korea, the amount of rainfall in winter is extremely small, so skiing resorts have to rely on artificial snow. After having skiing trip to Chamonix, the author felt that european countries are almost unbeatable in snow sports.

For South Koreans, 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic was the most dramatic because two miraculous events happend. One was Mo Taebum's the first gold medal in speed skating followed by Lee Sanghwa's another gold medal. Both won gold medals from the shortest track event 500m, which means the fastest man and woman on the ice were all South Korean. The second miracle was Yuna Kim's perfect gold medal. She broke the world record in both short and long programme, accordingly the total as well. This story will be followed later in detail.

A frontier always deserves compliment. South Korea had never received attention in the field of figure skating, and now there are hundreds and thousands times of young figure skaters in South Korea who want to follow Yuna Kim's beanten track. But, Yuna's life story tells us how difficult it is to blaze a new trail.

I got to know her for the first time when she won silver medal in world junior championship in 2004-2005. Back then I though she was one of those prodigies who might be easily forgotten but I also felt she was having something speciall in her personality and appearance (she's got just adorable style). So I immediately knew she was going to be a star (of course didn't expect a super star like now). Figure skating has been known as the flower of winter olympics. The author still remember the rivary relationship between Michelle Kwan and Tara Linpinski because it has been introduced by several TV programmes in South Korea, even though there had been no Korean figure skater in world class level. So, when Yuna Kim won silver medal in 2005-2006 and eventually gold medal from world junior championship in 2006-2007, she was a present to South Koreans but also there was a question mark whether she would be able to overcome the gap between junior level and senior level.