(Olympics) S. Korea rides late spurt to meet gold medal target

By Yoo Jee-ho

MILAN, Feb. 22 (Yonhap) -- Thanks to some late push from its short track speed skaters, South Korea met its target of taking home at least three gold medals from the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics this month.

With its last athletes in action, a pair of four-man bobsleigh teams, well out of medal contention entering the final day of the Olympics on Sunday, South Korea will likely finish with three gold medals, four silver medals and three bronze medals.

South Korea won two golds, five silvers and two bronzes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. For the 2026 competition in northern Italy, the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee (KSOC) had set out to win at least one more gold medal than Beijing.

Short track speed skater Kim Gil-li delivered that third gold medal with her women's 1,500-meter title Friday night over teammate Choi Min-jeong. Earlier Friday, the men's 5,000-meter relay team raced to the silver medal.

Once again, short rack speed skaters did the heavy lifting in the medal race. They accounted for two golds, three silvers and two bronzes -- compared to two golds and three silvers in Beijing.

Kim Gil-li was the lone double gold medalist for South Korea, as she anchored the women's 3,000m relay team to the title before winning the 1,500m gold. Kim also won bronze in the 1,000m and led all South Korean athletes here with three medals.

Choi finished with the relay gold and the 1,500m silver. With seven career medals, Choi became the most decorated South Korean Olympian, winter or summer.

On the men's side, the 18-year-old Rim Jong-un won bronze in the 1,000m and then combined for silver in the 5,000m relay. Hwang Dae-heon grabbed silver in the 1,500m to become the first South Korean male short tracker to win a medal at three consecutive Winter Olympics.

The short track team had a particularly inauspicious start. South Korea crashed out of the semifinals in its first medal event, the mixed team relay, when Kim got tripped up by Corinne Stoddard of the United States. South Korea was also shut out of individual gold medals until Kim broke through in the women's 1,500m, the very last individual race in Milan.

But by the time South Korea wrapped things up with three medals on Friday, those early misses were mostly forgotten.

With Choi announcing this was her final Olympics, the torch has been passed to the 21-year-old Kim, the first South Korean short tracker in 12 years to win at least three medals in an Olympic debut.

Relative to expectations, South Korea's snowboarders had a much more memorable Olympics than short track speed skaters, finishing with one gold, one silver and one bronze. Before this year, South Korea only had one snowboard medal in its Olympic history, a silver by Lee Sang-ho in the men's parallel giant slalom in 2018.

This year, Lee's lesser-known teammate, Kim Sang-kyum, grabbed silver in the same event for South Korea's first medal of the Milan-Cortina Games.

Kim's unexpected silver was aided by some lucky turn of events, as his opponents in both the round of 16 and the quarterfinals fell down before crossing the finish line during the knockout phase.

The 18-year-old Yu Seung-eun soared to a surprise bronze medal in the women's big air, and then another teenager, 17-year-old Choi Gaon, capped it all off with her awe-inspiring gold medal in the women's halfpipe. It was South Korea's first gold at these Winter Games.

Choi took a huge fall during the first of her three runs in the final. She later revealed she barely had any strength left in her legs, but somehow found extra energy to pull off a clean third run for the title.

Choi denied Korean American superstar Chloe Kim her third straight Olympic gold while also breaking Kim's record as the youngest Olympic snowboard champion.

South Korea hoped for a medal in the women's curling tournament, but skip Gim Eun-ji's team fell one win shy of a trip to the semifinals. A 10-7 loss to Canada in the final round-robin match sealed South Korea's fate, when a victory would have sent Gim and her teammates into the medal round.

South Korea was held without a speed skating medal for the first time since 2002. Chung Jae-won had a close call in the men's mass start, where he finished in fifth place, 0.18 second behind the bronze medalist, Andrea Giovannini of Italy.

South Korea enjoyed a victory away from fields of play, as the 2018 bobsleigh silver medalist Won Yun-jong was elected to the Athletes' Commission of the International Olympic Committee.

Won led 11 candidates by garnering 1,176 votes from 2,393 athletes who cast their ballots during the Olympics.

He is the third South Korean to have been elected to the commission, following the 2004 Olympic taekwondo gold medalist Moon Dae-sung and 2004 table tennis champion Ryu Seung-min, current KSOC president.

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