Kim Yeji: the coolest athlete of the Paris Olympics and a South Korean superstar

It is certainly a striking appearance.

The internet’s new favorite Olympian, South Korean pistol shooter Kim Yeji, looks something between an expert diamond dealer and a crack sniper from a renegade sci-fi army and is one of the standout stars of the Paris Games so far.

That’s the great thing about the Olympic Games. Before the matches you look forward to everything you already knew: maybe Sha’Carri Richardson in athletics, Andy Murray’s farewell in tennis or Simone Biles in gymnastics.

But then there are the things you didn’t know you cared about until you see them. And an incredibly cool looking pistol shooter certainly falls into that category.

Kim burst into the online consciousness after competing in the first of her two events in Paris, the 10 meter air pistol, on Sunday.

The “Women Posting Ws” hand in her pocket, that it was “the most radiance I have ever seen in a statue.”

The consensus on social media seemed to be that Kim looked like some kind of robo-killer from an action movie, a killer from the near future who doesn’t need your clothes, your boots or your motorcycle because she looks cool enough. own, thank you very much. GQ magazine wrote that she looked “straight out of a cyberpunk fan fiction”. Glamor magazine asked if Kim is “the biggest badass of the Paris Olympics”? Elon Musk also got involved, but let’s not let him screw it up.

The thing she was wearing isn’t really a pair of glasses, but more like a miniature scaffolding attached to her forehead that supports her performance. Above her left eye is a small black rectangle, a blinder that blocks one eye and allows greater focus in the other. Above her right eye was a small black circle, actually a relatively common feature with a mechanical iris to prevent blurring and allow greater focus on the target.

Then another video of Kim in action started making the rounds, of her wearing the same ‘glasses’ and with the same incredibly steady hand and android-like composure, but this time with her cap on backwards. The clip shows her shooting her final shot, putting down her gun, lifting the blinders over her left eye and giving an offstage look that was presumably just to check the score, but to the viewer it looked like she was looking at a unspecified doubter watched. with a feeling of Arctic-cold pity.

That fragment is not really from the Olympic Games, but from the World Cup in Baku earlier this year. She set the world record in that competition, on her way to winning the 25-meter pistol title. That’s what she’s aiming for at her other event, which takes place on Friday.

Kim is 31, originally from Maepo, about 100 miles southeast of Seoul, and now lives in nearby Danyang. She has been competing since 2006 and won bronze at the 2010 World Junior Championships in the 10 meter air pistol. On her profile on the International Sports Shooting Federation website, she simply mentions ‘sleeping’ under ‘hobbies’.

There was something else that only reinforced the feeling that she is actually a character from a Luc Besson film. Usually in those highly stylized stories, the killer has some form of unusual affection. Maybe it’s a fascination with a certain type of music, or an adherence to an age-old code of conduct, or they have a parakeet that they are strangely fond of or something like that.

Kim competed with a stuffed elephant tied to her belt. Which you could write down as an individual eccentricity, but in fact it was a kind of good luck charm that belonged to her five-year-old daughter, who is back home in Korea.

After the 10-meter medal ceremony, Kim told reporters 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 newfound viral status, Kim said, “I think I’ve become a little bit famous now.”

The only problem with all of this, if you can call it that, is that Kim didn’t actually win. At least on this occasion. The gold medal went to her compatriot Oh Ye-jin, 12 years younger than Kim, who beat her by just a few points to set an Olympic record of 243.2. Kim scored 241.3, meaning they both bettered the previous record of 240.3 set by Russia’s Vitalina Batsarashkina in Tokyo. Indian Manu Bhaker finished way back in third place.

Oh burst into tears after winning gold. “I still can’t believe I’m now wearing a gold medal around my neck,” Oh said. “Maybe in time I will believe it. By the way, this medal is very heavy.”

Kim wasn’t the only one with a little calling card: while it was the elephant for her, Oh had a little purple heart on the end of her gun – unfortunately not during the actual match, but just for the photos afterwards.

(Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)

But to further emphasize the wholesome nature of the whole story, Kim couldn’t have been happier for Oh, who is also her roommate at the athletes’ village in Paris.

“She looks like my little sister,” Kim told the Associated Press. “I always want to take care of her and always be there for her. So when she won the gold medal, I was extra happy.

“I don’t consider her my rival. This is a big stage, the Olympics, and we won gold and silver. When we won these medals, we were so proud to be Koreans.”

When a sporting event or an athlete essentially becomes a meme, the way these kinds of things usually happen is that they come to people’s attention after the event and then disappear, maybe until the next similar global event when people say, ‘Oh yeah , I remember her.”

This time, however, the internet will get a second chance to see Kim in all her shooting glory when she competes in the 25-meter pistol event on Friday. And she seems pretty confident she’ll do even better.

“I have faith all the time that I, Kim Yeji, will win gold no matter what.”

(Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)