S. Korea’s ‘Garlic Girls’ call out coaches
SEOUL, KOREA, REPUBLIC OF — The Garlic Girls, South Korea’s popular Olympic silver medallist curlers, accused their coaches Thursday of ruining the team with abusive treatment in a dispute that has spoiled one of the year’s feel-good sports stories.
The women’s claims, if confirmed, suggest a familiar tale of abuse, corruption and nepotism that has regularly marred South Korea’s highly hierarchical elite sports scene. Men often run South Korean sports efforts, and while the team’s head coach is a woman, men in her family, including her father, a former leading figure in South Korean curling, play a prominent part in the team’s accusations of abuse.
“We can no longer work with a coaching staff that is trying to divide the team,” Kim Seon-yeong said in a glum news conference in Seoul. The players also accused the coaching staff of skipping training sessions, holding back prize money and trying to force a married member off the team.
“We need a coaching staff that can train and lead us properly. We want to continue our curling careers and aim for bigger goals at the Beijing Olympics,” Kim said.
South Korea’s Sports Ministry and National Olympic Committee has announced a joint investigation into allegations that became public after the athletes sent a letter outlining their complaints to sports authorities last week.
The five-member women’s curling team became an overnight sensation after their improbable silver medal run in February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Their nickname is a nod to the famous garlic produced in their hometown in Uiseong, in southern South Korea, where they met and began playing together as teenagers.
In their letter to the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee last week, Kim Eun-jung, Kim Seon-yeong, Kim Cho-hee, and sisters Kim Yeong-ae and Kim Yeong-mi accused former Korean Curling Federation vice-president Kim Kyung-doo of verbal abuse and team coaches of giving unreasonable orders and subjecting their lives to excessive control.