If Chloe Kim Had Grown Up In South Korea, Would She Have Won The Gold Medal?

Snowboarding star Chloe Kim was born to Korean immigrant parents in the United States in 2000. Her father, Jong-jin Kim, had left South Korea in 1982 to study at the University of California.

When she was just 6 years old, Chloe won a junior snowboarding competition. Seeing his daughter’s great potential, her father quit his job to support her career. His reason was impressive. As Chloe told the Los Angeles Times, he announced to her mother, “I’m done working, I’m going to make my daughter an Olympian.”

“I’m not saying he forced me to snowboard, I genuinely love snowboarding, so it was nice he was that determined to bring me to the Olympics,” Chloe said in an interview with Reuters.

It was her father’s unconditional support combined with Chloe’s natural gift and hard work that ultimately led her to earn the title of the youngest Olympic gold medalist in women’s halfpipe snowboarding.

Chloe’s story sounds very familiar to us in South Korea.

It’s well known that world-class golfer Se-ri Pak’s golf teacher was her father. He saw her potential when she first visited a golf course in the sixth grade, and he started training her intensively. The lessons went on even in pouring rain; she once practiced putting over 300 times in the rain.

“I practiced very hard because I knew that I couldn’t be the best in the world if I took time off like others do,” Pak said in an interview with South Korea’s MBC. But her father was also always there.

The story is similar for Yuna Kim, the 2010 Olympic gold medalist in figure skating. “After discovering Yuna’s talent, I devoted my whole life to her skating career. Not only investing the majority of our time together, but also reorienting our lives around skating,” Kim’s mother, Mi-hee Park, said in an interview with Yeo-sung-dong-ah magazine. Park gave up her own life to support her daughter at Taereung Korea National Training Center and Gwacheon ice skating rink.

 Source :- huffingtonpost