Culture
Kim Yeji: The Paris Olympics' coolest athlete and a South Korean superstar
It’s certainly a striking look.
Looking like something between an expert diamond dealer and a crack sniper for some renegade sci-fi army, the internet’s new favourite Olympian, South Korean pistol shooter Kim Yeji, is one of the Paris Games’ most notable stars so far.
This is the great thing about the Olympics. Before the games you’re looking forward to all the stuff you knew about before: maybe Sha’Carri Richardson in the athletics, Andy Murray’s farewell in the tennis or Simone Biles in the gymnastics.
But then there’s the stuff that you didn’t know you cared about, until you see it. And an incredibly cool-looking pistol shooter most certainly falls into that category.
Kim crashed into the online consciousness after she competed in the first of her two events in Paris, the 10m air pistol on Sunday.
The X account ‘Women Posting Ws’, which seems to be the root source of her viral status, wrote alongside a picture of Kim shooting at the target, back slightly arched, her shoulder high with her chin resting on it and her non-shooting hand in her pocket, that it was “the most aura I have ever seen in an image”.
(Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
The social media consensus seemed to be that Kim looked like some sort of robo-assassin from an action film, a killer from the near future that doesn’t need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle, because she looks plenty cool enough on her own, thank you very much. GQ magazine wrote that she looked “straight out of a cyberpunk fan-fic”. Glamour magazine asked if Kim is “the biggest badass of the Paris Olympics?” Elon Musk got involved too, but let’s not allow him to ruin it.
The contraption she wore isn’t actually a pair of glasses as such, more a sort of miniature scaffolding attached to her forehead that aid her performance. Over her left eye is a small black rectangle, a blinder that blocks out one eye and allows greater focus in the other. Over her right eye was a small black circle, actually a relatively common bit of kit that features a mechanical iris to help avoid blurring and allows greater focus on the target.
Subsequently, another clip of Kim in action started to do the rounds, of her in the same ‘glasses’ and with the same incredibly steady hand and android-esque calm, but with her cap on backwards this time. The clip shows her shoot her final shot, put down her pistol, lift up the blinder over her left eye and give an off-stage look that presumably was to just check the score, but to the viewer looked like she was eyeballing some unspecified doubter with a sense of Arctic-cold pity.
That clip isn’t actually from the Olympics, rather the World Cup in Baku earlier this year. She set the world record in that competition, on her way to winning the 25m pistol title. That’s the one she’ll be aiming for in her other event, which takes place on Friday.
Kim is 31, originally from Maepo, which is about 100 miles south-east of Seoul, and now lives in nearby Danyang. She’s been competing since 2006, and won bronze at the 2010 World Junior Championships in the 10m air pistol. On her profile on the International Sports Shooting Federation website, under ‘hobbies’ she simply lists ‘sleeping’.
There was another thing that only enhanced the sense that she is actually a character from a Luc Besson film. Usually in those highly stylised stories, the assassin has some form of unusual affectation. Maybe it’s a fascination for a particular type of music, or an adherence to an ancient code of conduct, or they have a pet budgie that they’re weirdly devoted to or something.
Kim was competing with a stuffed toy elephant strapped to her belt. Which you could put down as an individual eccentricity, but in fact it was a sort of lucky charm that belongs to her five-year-old daughter, who is back home in Korea.
After the 10m medal ceremony, Kim told reporters that she couldn’t wait to tell her daughter all about her success. When asked what she was going to say about the medal, and her new-found viral status, Kim said: “I think I have become a bit famous now.”
The one problem with all this, if you can call it that, is that Kim didn’t actually win. On this occasion, at least. The gold medal went to her compatriot Oh Ye-jin, 12 years Kim’s junior, who edged her out by just a couple of points, setting an Olympic record of 243.2. Kim scored 241.3, meaning they both beat the previous record of 240.3, set by Russia’s Vitalina Batsarashkina in Tokyo. India’s Manu Bhaker was a way back in third.
Oh burst into tears after winning gold. “I still cannot believe I’m wearing a gold medal on my neck right now,” said Oh. “Maybe as time goes by, I will believe it. This medal is very heavy, by the way.”
Kim wasn’t alone in having a little calling card: while for her it was the elephant, Oh had a little purple heart on the end of her pistol — not, unfortunately, while she was actually competing, but just for the pictures afterwards.
(Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
But just to add to the wholesome nature of the whole story, Kim could not have been more delighted for Oh, who is also her roommate in the athletes’ village in Paris.
“She’s like my little sister,” Kim told the Associated Press. “I always want to care for her and always be there for her. So when she won the gold medal, I was extra happy.
“I do not view her as my rival. This is a big stage, the Olympics, and we won the gold and silver. When we won these medals, we were so proud we are Koreans.”
The way with these things usually, when a sporting occasion or an athlete essentially becomes a meme, is that they come to people’s attention after the event, and are then gone, perhaps until the next comparable global event when people say, “Oh yeah, I remember her.”
However, this time the internet will have a second chance to witness Kim in all of her shooting glory when she competes in the 25-metre pistol event on Friday. And she seems pretty sure she’ll go one better, too.
“I am confident all the time… I, Kim Yeji, am going to win gold, no matter what.”
(Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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