Desperately seeking Olympians
Games. Her first response was no.
In early 2016, a second entreaty came. This time Frisch reconsidered. She missed traveling and competing. And she was drawn to South Korea’s history of existing on a divided peninsula. In some ways, it resembled Germany’s own rived past.
“I liked the idea of becoming Korean,” Frisch said.
She took 40 hours of language, history and cultural lessons from a teacher in Germany, then moved to South Korea and immersed herself in the language and the culture. At first, some South Korean lugers were wary of her presence, Frisch said.
“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. They did not see that I could also help them to become better.”
In December 2016, Frisch received South Korean citizenship after passing an interview where she answered questions about Korean historical figures and sang the country’s national anthem. She also got better at luge.
“I’m having fun again,” Frisch said. “I reached skills I never had in Germany.”
Recruiting is essential for a Winter Games, whose sports are mostly obscure and generate a relatively limited pool of athletes. Even a winter power like Russia used two naturalized athletes — a Korean-born short-track speedskater named Viktor Ahn and an American-born snowboarder named Vic Wild — to win five of its nine gold medals as host of the 2014 Winter Games. (Four more golds won by Russian-born athletes were rescinded because of state-supported doping.)
Eleven of South Korea’s naturalized Olympians in 2018 are on its men’s (seven) and women’s (four) hockey teams. The country had only 200 to 300 registered adult players, and had never participated in previous Olympic hockey tournaments. The sport’s international governing body strongly encouraged South Korea’s Olympic officials to recruit foreign coaches and athletes to become competitive, said Yang Seung-jun, the chief of Olympic planning and preparation for the South Korean Ice Hockey Association.
While there was no opposition from Korean-born coaches and players, Yang said, “The most difficult part was Korean people’s sentiment against foreign players. Koreans are very ethnocentric. We had to work very hard to win their heart.”
Public opinion began to change somewhat after the South Korea men’s team defeated its archrival and Asian power Japan for the first time in 2016, Yang said. The South Korea women’s team won the world championship for fourthtier hockey nations in 2017. (At the 2018 Olympics, North and South Korea will have a joint women’s hockey team.)
“I think since then, Korean people started to open their hearts and became more interested in our team,” Yang said, “although there are still people who are not used to the idea of naturalization.”
Frisch, the luger, is not expected to win a medal at the Olympics and has struggled through foot injuries in the lead-up to the Winter Games. But Joo Se-ki, an assistant South Korean luge coach, said that Frisch has worked hard to fit in and provides valuable insight into training, know-how and even maintenance of sleds.
“The team has learned a lot from Aileen,” Joo said.
For some South Korean Olympians, dual citizenship has brought a reconnection with the land of their birth.
Marissa Brandt, 25, a hockey player, was born in South Korea, adopted by American parents and grew up in
Minnesota. In December 2016, after two months of presenting her birth certificate, adoption papers and other paperwork to prove where she was born, Brandt was given a South Korean passport.
Her birth name is Park Yoon-jung, which she wears on her jersey because that is “really my only tie to Korea.” Her younger sister, Hannah, plays for the U.S. national team, and they have talked often about how much fun it would be to play against each other at the Olympics.
“We always joke about who my mom and dad would cheer for,” Marissa Brandt said.
The language barrier in South Korea was forbidding, at first, and Brandt thought to herself, “How will I make it here?”
But her Korean-born teammates were welcoming and now they give one another language lessons, Brandt said. When South Korea won the world championship for lower-division teams in April, she said in an email, it was “a big turning point in terms of how I saw myself.”
As the South Korean flag was raised and the national anthem was played, Brandt felt proud to be Korean.
“It really was in that specific moment that I became OK with who I was and where I came from,” she said. “When I was younger, I shied away from embracing my Korean heritage. I just wanted to fit in and not look any different.”
Jackie Kling, 23, a freestyle skier, was also born in South Korea and adopted by American parents. She grew up in Pennsylvania and visited South Korea for the first time on a ski trip in 2014.
“It was a bit of a culture shock at times, being a person that looks Korean but doesn’t speak the language,” Kling said.
During that trip, serious conversations began with the Korean Ski Association about competing for South Korea. They continued into 2015, and Kling gained dual citizenship. She competes under her birth name, Lee Mee-hyun, and said in an email that she had been widely embraced by athletes and officials.
“It may be because they consider myself Korean and not a real outsider,” Kling said.