Skiing is a big yawn in S. Korea
As skier Mikaela Shiffrin chased gold, the chants of “U-S-A!” were closer to a whisper than a scream. What if they held an Olympic ski race and nobody came?
“It’s disappointing,” Shiffrin said Friday, after she finished the slalom in the worst place: fourth place. She vomited before competing, then missed the podium by half a hiccup, only eight hundreths of a second behind Austrian Katharina Gallhuber, the bronze medalist.
When Shiffrin chopped down a maze of slalom gates and leaned into the finish line at the conclusion of her second slalom run on a beautiful winter morning in Korea, there was a grand total of 372 spectators, either sitting in the stadium or standing on the snow at Yongpyong Alpine Centre. I know, because I counted them.
“Skiing in Korea is not that popular. That’s very sad. Mikaela Shiffrin is a big sports star, but she is not a big star here,” said C.K. Park of Seoul, one of the very rare Korean faces in the small crowd.
The nearly empty grandstands at a venue with capacity for 6,000 spectators gave Shiffrin’s quest for her second medal at the Winter Games the vibe of a jayvee football game. There might have been millions of American fans back home cheering.
But her live audience at the mountain on a sun-splashed Friday in South Korea was basically a family picnic watching Shiffrin place fourth in her best event, a stunning setback. Heck, I’ve seen way more people waiting in line for first chairlift at Winter Park on a powder day.
While there’s no way I can parachute into the Korean peninsula and immediately grasp what makes people tick, I feel confident in saying: Women’s skiing does not churn the locals’ butter. This is not Austria. Ski culture? There is none here. Should that
matter to the International Olympic Committee? Well, with the next Winter Games scheduled for China in 2022, maybe it’s the ring of the cash register rather than the clang of the cowbell that counts most.
“You should understand, in Korea, the people like a sport at the Olympics because there is a Korean player there. In speedskating, we are great, so people like it. But we don’t have any popular skier, and that’s why skiing is not that popular here,” Park said. He likes to ski but was attending the slalom primarily for the spectacle and the selfies with his wife and 9-year-old daughter.
And I’ve seen Park’s theory of root for the home team or go home in action. At women’s moguls, when lone Korean competitor Seo Jun Hwa was eliminated in the first round of finals, paying customers immediately began streaming for the exits in droves, not caring to see who won the medals.
Shiffrin is a real, big deal in the ski world. But she’s nothing in South Korea compared to Seollal, a national holiday that celebrates the lunar new year. Seollal was celebrated Friday. Families gathered, many dressed in traditional clothing to eat tteokguk, a good-luck soup whose main ingredient is sliced rice cakes. Yum?
In other words, Koreans had more important stuff to do than watch Shiffrin dance down the mountain through the slalom gates.
Racing for the second time in two days, battling the physical and mental fatigue after winning the giant slalom only 24 hours earlier, Shiffrin got no energy boost from a largely lifeless crowd.
The rows and rows of empty seats in the stands were a strange sight, as if LeBron James were playing Game 2 of the NBA Finals in a nearly empty high school gym. But the few fans wearing red, white and blue did what they could to make Shiffrin feel the love from back home.
“Whenever an American races, the excitement of the moment makes you feel a responsibility to cheer,” Eric Franz, a proud Cleveland resident attending his first Olympics alongside his wife. “We brought a Team USA cowbell to ring when Shiffrin was on course, but security took it away from us when we entered the stadium.” Spoilsports.
What if they invited worldclass athletes to ski down a mountain in Korea and nobody came? I guess that’s what happens when you put a big race in a place where Shiffrin has no Gangnam Style cred.