AFP, Seoul :
The ‘Garlic Girls’ South Korean curling team who became a media sensation with their unlikely run to this year’s Olympic final have accused their coaches of exploitation and verbal abuse as their sporting dreams turn sour.
The five women from a small rural town famous for farming the pungent bulb, rank outsiders at the start of the Pyeongchang Winter Games, shot to fame after stunning top teams Canada and Switzerland.
Their giant-killing feats – despite limited funding for their little-known sport – quickly earned them celebrity status in the South, with memes of the curlers going viral online.
But just months after becoming the first Asian curlers to claim Olympic silver, they say they are “miserable” and in a “desperate situation”.
Sidelined from the national team, the women have slipped from seventh to 14th in the world rankings.
Former Korean Curling Federation (KCF) vice-president Kim Kyung-doo subjected them to “countless cases of verbal abuse”, they said, and their coaches were imposing excessive control over their private lives.
The team accused them of seeking to sideline glasses-wearing captain Kim Eun-jung – whose trademark stare became an emblem of the Pyeongchang Games – after she married and told the coaches she planned to start a family.
“The human rights of the athletes are being violated,” the curlers wrote in a letter to the Korean Sports and Olympic Committee (KSOC). “We’ve reached a point where it has become unbearable.” The coaches had also kept back their prize money from international competitions, they added, reportedly amounting to tens of thousands of dollars since 2015. Coaches are hugely powerful in South Korea’s hierarchical sporting system, with the power to dictate an athlete’s career in a close-knit community where personal connections are almost as important as talent.
The curlers are also known as ‘Team Kim’ for their shared surname, and use food-based nicknames for ease of identification: the captain is Annie – a brand of yogurt – Kim Yeong-mi is Pancake, Kim Kyeong-ae is Steak, Kim Seon-yeong is Sunny – as in ‘sunny side up’ – and Kim Cho-hee is Chocho, a type of cookie.
