Pyongchang a frontrunner in the 2018 Winter Olympics bidding process?

According to AP (via WaPo), Pyongchang (p'yŏng•ch'ang, aka Pyeongchang) and Munich are the favorites in the run-up to the July 6 vote:

The two days of meetings with IOC members consolidated Pyeongchang’s longtime status as the city to beat, but also provided Munich a tangible boost as a serious challenger and gave Annecy hope to believe it still has a chance.

“The French are working well and trying hard, but I think very honestly it will be between Germany and Korea,” Swiss IOC executive board member Rene Fasel told The Associated Press.

Another senior board member, Richard Carrion of Puerto Rico, agreed.

“I think this one is a close race between the top two,” he told the AP.

Fasel said there is “no question” that Pyeongchang remains the favorite. The South Koreans, bidding for a third consecutive time after narrow defeats for the 2010 and 2014 Games, are pushing the case of taking the Olympics to a new winter sports market in Asia.

“I don’t think it’s that easy,” said Gerhard Heiberg, an executive board member from Norway. “It’s closer than what people say.”

Let's hope Kim Yuna can charm off the ice as well as on.

Kim Yuna off to Switzerland

Kim Yuna is heading for Lausanne, Switzerland, to directly promote P'yŏngch'ang's bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics ('cept they're writing it as Pyeongchang).

Although President Lee Myungbak is also in Europe for a week-long trip to Germany, Denmark, and France ahead of the ratification of the EU-Korea Free Trade Agreement, he himself will not be attending the Swiss meeting to promote Urinara's bid.

Anyway, with all the snow that was on the ground the last time the IOC visited, and now the reigning ice queen demonstrating that winter sports are starting to arrive in East Asia, the Olympics folks will be quite attentive when Ms Kim tells them how South Korea would be such a great venue.

Miki Ando defeats Kim Yuna (UPDATED)

Japan's darling of skating Miki Ando, showing her disdain for all the South Koreans who donated tens of millions of dollars to help the victims of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, defeated the reigning ice queen Kim Yuna at the Figure Skating World Championship in Moscow.

"I was skating for Japan," Ms Ando said. And we all know exactly what that means.

Miki Ando throws up a little in her mouth when asked
by a reporter what she thinks of Korea.

Seriously, though, mucho congratulations to Ms Ando, who is an incredible skater. The friendly rivalry between Kim Yuna and the top Japanese skaters (to include Mao Asada) makes it all the more interesting to watch (and yeah, it is interesting). I'll go on record as saying it's a little less fun if Kim Yuna wins every time.

Moreover, this kind of thing might be enough to lift the spirits of a lot of people in Japan. The Tohoku tragedy was a nightmare in the middle of a malaise, something that is palpable when talking to young and old from Japan, and I so want for Japanese to rise up and see a bright future on the horizon.

UPDATE:
Kim Yuna has announced through her agent that she will donate the $27,000 prize money from her silver medal finish to UNICEF's relief efforts in Japan. Class act all the way.

Brian Orser and Kim Yuna split taking on a life of its own

It really is starting to sound like an unimaginatively written soap opera. Read more about the inside scoop on the comments section at The Hole.

Kim Yuna and Brian Orser in gayer times.

Q&A on the Kim Yuna-Brian Orser split

And by "QA," I mean quirky answers.

Read this interview with a member of Yuna Kim's management team and tell me Ms Choi wasn't plucked from a personnel management position at a hagwon somewhere.

Viral video of Kim Yuna getting lei'd! Culture Minister up in arms!

First, here's the video:



Now go read about all the commotion.

ROK Olympic Committee to release commemorative coins of Kim Yuna — minted in Australia

That's a bit weird. From the Donga Ilbo:

“We will issue commemorative coins to celebrate Kim’s gold medal and share the moment of joy,” it said in announcing Korea’s first commemorative coin for an athlete.

The coins will come in gold (22.6 millimeters in diameter and 7.78 grams in weight) and one-ounce silver (40.6 millimeters in diameter and 31.1 grams in weight) varieties.

The head will contain an image of Kim’s free skating performance and signature, and the committee’s insignia. The gold coin will sell for 880,000 won (771.25 U.S. dollars) and the silver for 121,000 won (106.05 dollars).

The commemorative coins have three unique traits. First, they have been manufactured by the Perth Mint of Australia, not by the Korean mint. The coins are being circulated in Tuvalu in northeast Australia that has a population of only 12,000.

The face value of the coins is written in the Australian dollar, not in Korean won. The gold coin has a value of 25 Australian dollars (22.56 U.S. dollars) and the silver one Australian dollar (0.90 U.S. dollar).

Since the coins are commemorative and not genuine currency, they can't be manufactured by Korea's mint, which does produce money for other countries. Hmm. Korean double standards, yet again. (There is no point to this post.)

The LAT on Kim Yuna: "A champion for all time"

If you can stomach any more of this, the Los Angeles Times has a piece on the enduring greatness of Kim Yuna:

The skater and her coach were in a car going from post-competition doping control to a press conference that would be aired live in South Korea, where half the country's 48 million people already had watched TV broadcasts of their national hero becoming their first Olympic figure skating champion.

During the 20-minute ride, Kim and Orser simply could have sat back and looked at the gold medal she won three hours earlier with a performance of record-breaking, mind-boggling quality. Instead, as Orser sat in a front seat and Kim in the back, they leaned together to study details on the score sheet, talking about places to improve in her next competition, the March World Championships.

That discussion speaks to the particular greatness Kim displayed in the Olympics.

If, at age 19, she already has joined the sport's legends, it will owe not only to Kim's lighter-than-air grace in her movements on the ice and her huge jumps but also to Team Kim's grounding in the demands of figure skating's scoring system.

Never have athlete and artist been more perfectly balanced than they are with Kim. Never has a skater with both those qualities displayed them so flawlessly in the sport's most important competition.

"I always wanted to be Olympic champion and do clean programs," Kim said. "This was the first time I have done both programs clean, and I am very joyful it was at the Olympics."

That achievement alone sets her apart from many of the sport's greats, especially because they had to do far fewer defined elements in a four-minute program that used to embody its title: free skate.

I forgot where I read it, but someone in one of the K-blogs made a point that Kim Yuna represents a worthy goal for so many Korean girls and women now: She achieved what she did through her own hard work, her wits, her intelligence, her perseverance, etc., not a trust fund, a rich husband, or going to the right school (I'm paraphrasing).

As she alludes to above, this was a victory devoid of controversy or even mistake: No one (except for a few disgruntled Mao Asada fans whose lack of class does not represent Japan as a whole) questions that she earned it. That makes it kinda neat by itself, even if she weren't a "queen" of skating: It's a demonstration that thoroughgoing attention to detail and doing things the right way (versus cutting corners to get ahead, is the path to good things (although it might add fuel to the fire for South Korea's we-must-be-perfect-or-else-we've-failed crowd).

金 = gold

A runaway, record-breaking 228.56 points for a gold medal! I hearby declare this 연아절! Congratulations, Kim Yuna! [NBC.com video available here]

From Sports Illustrated:

Kim Yu-na put one hand to her mouth and let the tears flow.

All that pressure, so many expectations. The "Queen" took it all on and delivered royally.

The South Korean won the Olympic gold medal Thursday night, soaring to a world-record 228.56 points and shattering her previous mark by more than 18 points. It may go down as one of the greatest performances in figure skating history, and it's sure to set off wild celebrations from Seoul to Pyongchang [Kushibo notes that SI wrote it that way]. It's South Korea's first medal at the Winter Olympics in a sport other than speedskating.

Even Kim seemed to be dazzled by the show she put on, gasping when she saw the monstrous score. Coach Brian Orser gave a Rocky-like victory pump, shaking his clasped fists over each shoulder.

And to all those in South Korea who use international sporting events as a proxy for national prestige, congratulations to you, too, I guess. I can hear your whooping and hollering all the way over here.

But much more congratulations to Kim Yuna (金姸兒, 김연아 for those of you looking to see how her name is spelled in Hangul), as well as to Japan's Mao Asada of Japan who won the silver with 205.50 points, and Canada's Joannie Rochette who won the bronze with 202.64 points (and who has been through an awful lot, so this undoubtedly means an awful lot to her).


As the SI hints above, this kind of performance in a signature Olympic event could bode well for Pyongchang (aka Pyeongchang) in its bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics.

I was hoping that Laura Lepistö of Finland (#6 with 187.97 points) or Mirai Nagasu of the US (#4 with 190.15) might also medal (for a while, before the favorites skated, Ms Lepisto was #1), but no such luck. We'll have to see in 2014 (that is, if there's any ice available).

The nearly seventeen-year-old Ms Nagasu will be back, as will South Korea's next skating star (?), sixteen-year-old Kwak Minjung, who came in at #13 with 155.53 points.

And can the bloodthirsty netizens just suck it up now and stop harassing Mr Hewish? Please? Just take the rest of the day off like everybody else in South Korea and drink so much beer and/or soju you can't make it back to your car.

Icing on the cake

Would South Korean fervor about Kim Yuna not exist or simply not be as, well, fervent if there were no Mao Asada or Miki Ando (or even Mirai Nagasu)? Is the existence of Japanese competitors and the prospect of beating them a major factor in Kim Yuna's runaway popularity in South Korea? Without Mao as a rival, would Kim Yuna not have made $8 million last year?

John Glionna of the Los Angeles Times seems to think so:

Wearing a sassy black dress, twisting and leaping to a medley of spy thriller songs, the queen of South Korean figure skating is continuing a quest her countrymen hope is no mission impossible:

Not just to win, but to beat the Japanese in the process.

Kim Yuna, the pouting 19-year-old monarch-on-ice, is poised to win South Korea's first Olympic gold medal in figure skating -- a feat that for many countrymen would prove to be a satisfying athletic and political victory over their Asian neighbors.

Because when it comes to sports competitions against Japan, their colonial-era overlords from 1910 to 1945, Koreans wear their fiercest game faces -- whether on a baseball or soccer field, or even within the graceful realm of the figure-skating rink.

"With South Korea versus Japan, it is all about one-sided nationalism," said Shin Kwang-yeong, sociology professor at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. "Of course, Japan's colonization of Korea and emotions between the two countries are instilled in sports.

"It's a phenomenon based on South Korea's group perception about its traumatic history. If you do not win a gold medal, other medals are not satisfying."

And medals are sweeter if snatched from a Japanese competitor.

I know I'm swimming against the current of K-blog public opinion here, but I think Mr Glionna is betraying a facile inspection that is so common in anglophone analysis of Korea as to be cliché: If some issue or incident involving Korea can be even remotely connected with Japan, then Korea's longstanding han must be a major factor if not primary cause of whatever that is.

True, the loudest voices among the netizenry may bring up such things — whether it's the much maligned Apolo Ohno being half-Japanese or the President of Korea being someone trying to make nice with Japan and who was born in Japan and lived there for five years — but for the general population, I submit, the Japan factor is merely icing on the cake if it's something being considered at all.

Let's go back to my original questions: Would Kim Yuna be loved any less, would she be any less possible or any less rich, if she had no Japanese competitors? I submit that the answer is a resounding no. There is no small dose of national(istic) pride in support for her — she is going to get a gold for our country and serve as a shining example of Korean skill, ingenuity, and coolness — but that patriotic passion would be there whether her primary opponent were Japanese or Jamaican, American or Armenia, Chinese or Chilean, North Korean or South African.

Let me demonstrate. Imagine that through a series of small miracles that the Korean national team were able to make it into the group of 16 at the World Cup in South Africa. Then through a series of luck and more miracles, into the final eight, then the final four, and eventually we see South Korea in the actual final game of the World Cup.

Anyone in South Korea in 2002 knows that the ROK would be going so crazy over this that the manufacturing base would virtually shut down for two weeks and the entire country would be a giant party zone full of hyped up people going nuts with the prospect of being the best team in the world in soccer. The entire country would be on edge like never before with each pass in the final game, with screams resonating across the peninsula with each near miss. The screams following a goal by Korea, Republic of would be deafening.

Okay, now imagine the final game is, through other miracles, being played against Japan. Would the anticipation and anxiety be greater? Probably some, but replace Japan with Brazil and there would still be national insanity. In 2002, no matches were played against Japan, but the country was still at a fever pitch.

Icing on the cake. But not the cake.

So while the Korea-versus-Japan aspect would be an additional element, it would be a superfluous element. And it's sloppy and lazy for anglophone reporters to use it as a standby. Let me use another illustration: let's imagine that there were a lot of public gloating in South Korea about Toyota's woes instead of the subdued response in which a lot of people worry that Hyundai and Kia are in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kinda situation (and I have no doubt some people are gloating, as they are in the US as well).

It would be easy for Mr Glionna or some K-bloggers to attribute that sentiment not just to national pride about Hyundai and Kia not having such problems (anymore), but to this stick-it-to-former-colonizer attitude that, in their minds, always prevails. And people would read that and nod their heads in agreement, going, "Yeah, South Koreans really hate the Japanese."

But here, where in actuality there isn't much of such gloating at all, we don't see a soul-searching discussion of why South Koreans aren't hating on the Japanese when they have the perfect opportunity to do so. Because that would mean dismantling this facile notion and putting its parts in a museum somewhere.

A few paragraphs back, I mentioned people who bash President Lee Myungbak for his pro-Japan geopolitical stance by pointing out that he was born in Japan (Osaka, to be precise). Yes, there really are such people (Google 이명박+일본놈 or some such), but they do not represent the norm at all. In fact, President Lee's Japanese-ness rarely is brought up in criticism. Yet it would be right there for Mr Glionna or K-bloggers to again talk up South Korea's eternal hatred of Japan if President Lee ever were the target of many South Koreans' wrath over something Japan-related.

Kim Yuna performs adequately in Vancouver

I didn't watch it, me being a jinx and all, but I knew right away something big happened because Ms Kim Yuna's form was splattered all over the news sites, including the New York Times above.

Indeed, she not only came out on top in the women's figureskating short program, she set a world record with her score. But the medal work is not over, and we'll have to see how she does tomorrow (and then I'll watch it online after that... the whole jinx thing).

UPDATE (two days later):
Kim Yuna has won the gold!

There's mills' in them there gold!

The Los Angeles Times has a list of they best paid Olympic athletes. Only one South Korean — Kim Yuna — made the list, but she's at the top... even though she is yet to compete in the Olympics, much less win a medal. She took in a reported $8 million last year.

Apolo Ohno isn't exactly slumming it, either. With endorsement deals and what-not, the guy took in a cool $1.5 million last year alone. This is on top of millions more dollars from past years, as well as his Dancing With the Smarm Stars turn.

 Athlete (country), earnings 
1. Shaun White (USA), $8 million
1. Kim Yu-Na (South Korea), $8 million
3. Lindsey Vonn (USA), $3 million
4. Ted Ligety (USA), $2 million
5. Apolo Anton Ohno (USA), $1.5 million
6. Bode Miller (USA), $1.3 million
7. Gretcher Bleiler (USA), $1 million
7. Lindsey Jacobellis (USA), $1 million
7. Hannah Teter (USA), $1 million
7. Maria Riesch (Germany), $ 1 million

"Kim Yuna takes on 300 reporters in Vancouver"

Taking on three hundred anybody is not a good way to maintain a "low profile."

Things are going to be tough. I guess she won't be gilding the lily in Canada.

[left: Kim Yuna limbers up to take on Vancouver.]

LAT on Kim Yuna

As we inch centimeter closer and closer to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, expect more stories like this:

In 1988, the only other time the Winter Olympics were in Canada, Orser was the country's best hope for a gold medal. He won a silver, and Canada got no gold, making Orser want to apologize to the country.

Now he is Kim's coach, the one about whom South Korean newspapers have written, "Coach Orser is the savior." Said Kim's agent, Michelle Ha: "Brian is the most popular foreigner in Korea."

In four seasons with Orser, Kim, 19, has become far more than the first Korean figure skater of any renown. She is a superstar of such proportions that Seoul street caricaturists trying to lure customers display her image to show their skill.

No figure skater ever has been more celebrated in her home country than Kim is.

"I don't really know why [the Korean people] love me," Kim said. "Maybe it's because figure skating isn't just about who won, it's also artistic.

It's because you come across as cute and have an innocent air about you, you symbolize a hard-working ethic people admire, you represent Korean supremacy in something the whole world watches, and yeah, because figure skating is kinda cool to watch every four years.

Loose change for December 16, 2009

 Economic news 

• The Government has delayed its discussion on the establishment of for-profit hotels hospitals in South Korea. (Thanks for catching the error, Brendon.)
• Tax accountants are the highest earners in South Korea, taking in an average monthly salary of 10.73 million won (around $10,000) per month.
• "Apple envy" is behind a shake-up at Samsung.
• South Korea will launch Yuan futures in 2011. 

 North Korea news and stuff 

•  Jane's Intelligence Weekly says the North Korean weapons stash was bound for the Sudan.
• The White House and the State Department have confirmed that President Obama wrote a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il that was delivered by envoy Stephen Bosworth.
• An op-ed in the Asian Wall Street Journal says that the arms seizure in North Korea shows us the real Kim Jong-il. 

 Other Korea-related stuff 

• Choe Sanghun of the New York Times reports on the "sea of opposition" to President Lee's Four Rivers Project.
• South Korea has dismissed Taliban warnings against ROK military deployment as psychological rhetoric.
• The main opposition party has proposed a bill that would require a court-issued warrant for authorities to enter the home of suspected illegal aliens in South Korea.
• The US and South Korea will forge a set of symbolic guidelines to reaffirm the ROK-US alliance as the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War approaches. Story also here.
• Opposition lawmakers are trying to initiate serious study of an underground — and below-water — extension of the high-speed KTX railway to Chejudo.  
• The Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs is investigating G-Dragon for obscene content in his songs and performances.
• Gallup Korea says Kim Yuna has been rated the top athlete of the year.
• More healthy bacteria found in kimchi.

 Miscellany 

• The US and Vietnam have agreed to expand military links.