A Nation Got the Olympics. Then It Needed Olympians.
said. “I didn’t have much fun anymore.”
Then South Korea’s new national coach, Steffen Sartor, a German, contacted Ms. Frisch in 2015 to gauge her interest in competing for South Korea. Her first response was no. But in early 2016, she reconsidered. She was drawn to South Korea’s history of existing on a divided peninsula. In some ways, it resembled Germany’s own past. “I liked the idea of becoming Korean,” Ms. Frisch said.
She took language and cultural lessons, then moved to South Korea. At first, some South Koreans were wary. “I got the feeling that some of my teammates thought I should have not come to Korea,” she said. “They thought I’m just a foreigner and were afraid I would take their place.”
In late 2016, Ms. Frisch received South Korean citizenship. She also improved at luge. “I’m having fun again,” she said.
Recruiting is essential for a Winter Games, whose sports generate a limited pool of athletes. Eleven of South Korea’s naturalized Olympians in 2018 are on its men’s and women’s hockey teams. The country had never participated in Olympic hockey. The sport’s international governing body encouraged South Korea’s Olympic officials to recruit foreign coaches and athletes, said Yang Seung-jun of the South Korean Ice Hockey Association. “Koreans are very ethnocentric,” he said. “We had to work very hard to win their heart.”
Public opinion began to change after the South Korea men’s team de- feated Japan in 2016, Mr. Yang said. The women’s team won the world championship for fourth- tier hockey nations in 2017. (At the Olympics, North and South Korea had a joint women’s hockey team, which lost, 8- 0, to Switzerland on February 10.)
Marissa Brandt, 25, a hockey player, was born in South Korea, adopted by American parents and grew up in Minnesota. In December 2016, she was given a South Korean passport.
Her birth name is Park Yoon-jung, which she wears on her jersey be- cause that is “really my only tie to Korea.”
But when South Korea won the world championship in April, she said, it was “a big turning point in terms of how I saw myself.”
As the South Korean f lag was raised, Ms. Brandt felt proud to be Korean. “It really was in that specific moment that I became O.K. with who I was and where I came from,” she said.
Ms. Frisch, the luger, did not win a medal at the Olympics. The Germans would take home the gold and silver.