Story of Olympic sportsmanship takes some dark twists.
In 2000, Esther Kim gave her spot on the U.S. Olympic taekwondo team to Kay Poe. Their lives subsequently took some harsh twists.
Twenty years have come and gone since May 20, 2000, an extraordinary day that Kay Poe and Esther Kim shared as bright, shining exemplars of friendship and sportsmanship — one sacrificing her Olympic dream so a friend could experience hers.
Scheduled to fight that day for a spot on the U.S. Olympic taekwondo team, Kim, 20, forfeited rather than kick against Poe, 17, who had suffered a dislocated kneecap in a preliminary match.
It was quite a scene. The young women hugged and cried, crowds cheered, adulation ensued, Oprah Winfrey called, and magazine stories and television appearances showered down like confetti.
But the spotlight faded. And so, for a time, did the friendship.
Two decades removed from that day in Colorado Springs, Colo., Kay Poe Sheffield is a mother of two and a plaintiff in a lawsuit laced with allegations that embody the now all-too-familiar dark side of the Olympic ideal.
And Esther Kim is dead.
Frayed connection
Even when she was one of the world’s best taekwondo athletes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kay Poe, now Kay Poe Sheffield, never relished the spotlight.
But taekwondo gave her a chance to travel the world and channel the boundless energy that kept getting her in hot water for capers such as spray-painting “I love Gob” (she was going for “God” but slipped up on the final letter) on the family home.
Even though she was the beneficiary of the events of May 20, 2000, she has mixed emotions about the day, including the lingering question of whether she could have been as generous as her friend in similar circumstances.
“It was genuine,” Poe Sheffield said. “When Esther said she didn’t want to fight me, she really didn’t. She really wanted me to go to the Olympics and didn’t want to win like that (against an injured opponent).
“But when I think about it, it makes me sad, too, because Esther’s not here.”
The two met in 1987 while attending a taekwondo school owned by Kim’s father, Jin Won
Kim. Esther came to a Halloween party dressed as a pirate and was assigned by her father to look after Kay, who wore a black Ninja outfit. The two grabbed hands and, for more than a decade, rarely let go.
“We’re in our own little bubble,” Kim said in 2000. “If we let people in, they wouldn’t understand the way we can understand each other. We don’t know how to say things. We know what the other is thinking. We can make conversation with eye contact.”
Poe was the more advanced fighter in the Korean-originated combat sport, winning a national championship in 1995 at age 13 and two international titles in 1999 fighting in the under-108 pounds weight class.
2000 marked the sport’s Olympic debut, and the two were in the same weight class at the Olympic Trials in Colorado Springs. Poe defeated Kim in their preliminary match, but in her final prelim suffered a dislocated kneecap against Houston competitor Mandy Meloon.
The kneecap was popped back into place, but Poe had to leave the competition floor clinging to her coach’s back. She was in no condition to continue for the final against Kim.
“Any other taekwondo person would have gone out there and fought and taken advantage of that knee,” Kim said in 2000. “But with 13 years of friendship, I can’t do that. … I would always have known in the back of my mind the only reason that I won is because she had only one leg.”
The decision to forfeit “hurt so much,” Kim said. “But I was crying out of happiness. I was throwing my dreams away to let her make my dreams come true for both of us.”
For her gesture, Kim was invited to attend the Olympic Games as the guest of International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch and received sportsmanship awards in the U.S. and South Korea.
In Sydney, though, things became muddled in a fashion that would not become clear until much later. With Kim in the audience, Poe, the gold medal favorite, lost her opening match and did not medal.
By 2001, the two were competitors, training with different coaches. By 2002, Kim was essentially done with the sport because of injuries. Poe won the 2002 Pan American title but never made another Olympic team.
In 2006, she said, she was in rehab for drug and alcohol issues that came on the heels of an eating disorder, an all-too-common malady of the time among Olympic athletes in sports governed by weight restrictions.
“I didn’t have the basic skills to cope with life on life’s terms,” Poe Sheffield said. “I could get addicted to anything.”
Poe Sheffield said she and Kim didn’t speak again until 2009, when they rekindled their friendship.
“You know how Esther is. I had never met anyone like her,” she said. “In 2011, I got engaged, and she was going to be in my wedding. But the day before my wedding, she called and said she couldn’t come, and that was the last time we spoke.”
She saw her friend once more in December, shortly before Kim, 40, was hospitalized in the end stages of liver failure.
“I didn’t know she was having issues, and that’s one of my biggest regrets,” Poe Sheffield said. “I wish that I had reached out to her, but I don’t think she would have accepted it.
“We let our egos get in the way of things. It’s sad.”
Harboring the pain
Paul Kim says his older sister was weeping when she called the family’s Houston home from Colorado Springs on the evening of May 20, 2000, to report on the Olympic Trials outcome.
“I asked her if she had won, and she said no,” he said. “I was so disappointed. All she did was ask me to tell Mom that she had called.”
The next morning, Kim’s mother, Yong Ok Kim, showed Paul Kim a copy of that day’s Houston Chronicle, with his sister’s photo on the front page under the headline “One victory, two champions.”
“That’s when I learned that she had done something that was much more important than winning,” Paul Kim said.
Esther Kim’s family — her mother, brother and sister Jamie — agree that she never understood the adulation she received for forfeiting the final match.
“She was turned off by it,” Jamie Kim said. “She felt it was the right thing to do, so why should something good that we should expect from people receive so much attention?”
Taekwondo had been a big part of Esther Kim’s life since she earned her first-degree black belt at age 7.
While attending Klein schools and the University of Houston, she won national junior and collegiate titles and hoped to compete for the 2004 Olympics until a knee injury in June 2001 effectively ended her competitive career.
The widespread attention of 2000-01 gave way to repeated setbacks. Her father asked her to manage a taekwondo school in Katy, then sold it. Her parents’ marriage ended in divorce, and she moved to Minnesota to teach taekwondo but had to supplement her income, her mother said, by working at a convenience store.
“She worked so hard, but things didn’t go well,” her mother said.
Paul Kim said he believed his sister’s life picked up when she gave up taekwondo and moved to Dallas.
“She was free from all the crazy training and lived a life that any young adult would live, being on your own without committing six or seven hours a day to practice,” he said.
She retained her Type A per
sonality, her siblings said, when she returned to Houston in 2011.
“She didn’t think we were doing a good enough job taking care of Mom,” Paul Kim said, laughing. “That was her first reason for coming back.”
Yong Ok Kim, though, said her daughter never found anything in her life to replace taekwondo and never shook off the anger and resentments that grew during her years in and out of the sport.
Jamie Kim said her sister began abusing alcohol when she was in Dallas. It was, she believes, part of an attempt to cope with life after sports.
“She tried to forget all the pain and the memories,” her mother said. “That’s why she started, and then she couldn’t help herself. She wouldn’t listen to anybody. She didn’t think she had a problem. She wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t want to hear about it.”
Paul Kim said his sister “was always strong-minded, you might say stubborn. She would say, ‘I’ve got this. Don’t worry. It’s not your business.’ When we would extend helping hands, she would say she didn’t need them. That was Esther.
“But at the same time, she would always stand up for me. I told her she didn’t have to fight my battles for me like she did in high school, but that was Esther.”
Beneath the surface of the hard-edged taekwondo competitor, Jamie Kim said, “there was a softer personality that cared for people and expected them to care for her in the same manner. That side of her was always waiting in the wings to come out.”
Family members said Kim’s health took a turn for the worse beginning in early 2017. She required brief hospital stays every three to six months, and the final trip came in November 2019.
“She had done this often enough that we didn’t think much of it,” Jamie Kim said. “But she went into a coma and was there for almost two weeks.
“She woke up, which gave us hope that she would come out of it. She would be responsive and could nod her head and smile, but as soon as we saw some form of life or energy, it was quickly taken away.”
In her final days, family members said, old friends and former competitors flocked to the hospital to pay their respects.
“She loved the people she worked with, but somehow she thought that nobody cared for her. Somehow, things got disconnected,” Yong Kim said. “That is what hurts so much, because there was part of her that was full of love.”
“If Esther had known how much all these people cared for her, maybe that would have changed how she thought of herself,” Jamie Kim said. “As Mom said, maybe it would have saved her.”
She died Dec. 10, and friends contributed more than $10,000 to a GoFundMe account to help the family with funeral expenses.
Jake Stovall, a former taekwondo athlete and coach who organized the fundraiser, said Kim’s post-taekwondo struggles were typical of those faced by many elite athletes.
“You lose your identity when you reach a certain level,” Stovall said. “She worked for a goal (the Olympics) and gave it away, and then her knee got hurt, and it was taken away. She had nothing positive to turn to. There was no fallback plan, and to numb that, she started drinking.”
Stovall, however, said Kim remained a loyal friend to those who kept faith with her, and she focused her attention above all things on her family.
Five days after she died, upward of 200 people attended a memorial service that included eulogies in English and Korean and the hymns “Marching to Zion” and “Amazing Grace.”
“People never realized how much she cared,” Jamie Kim said. “She was such a strong personality that it didn’t always come across. She was super audacious and bold. She would always tell you what she thought about you. That’s how some people show love. She would share her honest truth.”
A sport’s sordid side
Among those attending Esther Kim’s funeral, sitting alongside friends and former competitors Mandy Meloon and others, was Kay Poe Sheffield, who has lived in Houston since her days as an athlete.
She has been married since 2011 to Jason Sheffield, and the couple have two children, Isabella, 7, and Noah, 3.
“I’m getting payback,” Poe Sheffield said. “When I was about 4, my mom had just had a liver transplant, and I would run away from her and say, ‘You can’t catch me.’
“When I was pregnant, my daughter did the same thing. She hid under a table, and I couldn’t get to her, and she said, ‘You can’t catch me.’ ”
In 2018, she joined a group of former taekwondo athletes in a federal court lawsuit filed in Colorado against the U.S. Olympic Committee, USA Taekwondo, the U.S. Center for SafeSport, twotime Olympic gold medalist Steven Lopez, and his brother and coach, Jean Lopez.
The plaintiffs, all of whom trained or lived in Houston at some point, alleged they were sexually abused and exploited while training and competing on behalf of Team USA.
The lawsuit describes several alleged instances of sexual abuse and rape committed by Jean and Steven Lopez and other taekwondo athletes. It said the USOC and USA Taekwondo served as “travel agent and commercial funder for the Lopez brothers in the domestic and international sexual exploitation of young female athletes.”
The Lopez brothers have denied the allegations and sought dismissal of the lawsuit. They have not commented to the Chronicle on the allegations, but in 2017 denied to USA Today that they had assaulted or sexually assaulted the plaintiffs.
The suit has been amended to drop the USOC, SafeSport and Jean Lopez as defendants, based on procedural rulings involving cases that fall outside the statute of limitations.
The most recent amended complaint, however, provided a brief look into the events that impacted Poe and Kim after the Olympic Trials — namely, Poe’s allegation that she had a sexual relationship with Jean Lopez that began in 1999, when Poe was 17 and Jean Lopez was in his mid-20s.
The relationship, Poe Sheffield said in the lawsuit, continued through the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
“Taekwondo messed with me,” she said. “I didn’t realize how messed up things were in that sport until I became a grownup and realized in the real world that those things didn’t happen.
“My moral compass, realizing what was right and wrong … it took years to process it, and it was not something I wanted to deal with.”
She said the manner in which coaches and athletes preyed on young women has made her reluctant to let her daughter participate in sports.
“She would love it, but I’m terrified that she might fall in love with a sport and be in the same situation I was in,” Poe Sheffield said.
Kay’s father, retired insurance executive Ken Poe, knew he was walking a fine line when he and his wife, Linda, allowed Kay to advance to national and international competition.
“When she got involved in the Olympic circle, I told Linda that this is either the smartest or the dumbest thing we’ve done,” he said. “And my feelings about it have swung back and forth over the years.
“I feel that I failed her as a parent because I was unaware of the danger that she was in.”
The fine line between the fates of Kay Poe Sheffield and Esther Kim struck Ken Poe full in the face when he and his daughter visited Kim in the hospital last December.
“It could have been my daughter just as easily. There was a real awareness of that,” he said.
Of Kay’s life during and after taekwondo, he added, “She’s had her difficulties, but it’s a process. There’s no beginning and no ending. It’s continual. If she has the right kind of people around her, she will survive.”
Attorney Stephen Estey said the lawsuit filed by former athletes Meloon, Heidi Gilbert, Gabriela Joslin, Amber Means and Poe Sheffield is in mediation before a federal court in Denver. He said if a settlement cannot be reached, the women are prepared to take the case to trial.
“When you look at these young women, the trajectory of their lives has been altered. The harm has been very real,” he said. “We hope that we can close this chapter and they can continue to heal.
“Kay has gotten her life together, but it’s been a long road.”
Poe Sheffield said she participated in the lawsuit in hopes of bringing change to Olympic sports.
“I want there to be accountability, like it is in a regular office where things like this can’t happen and if they are, they get reported,” she said.
“You see the Olympic rings, and you have this false sense of security. There are steps they can take to protect the athletes, and I hope that this leads to more transparency and more accountability.”
Poe Sheffield, Meloon, Joslin and Gilbert all attended Kim’s memorial service in December, and Meloon and her daughter spent this week in Galveston with the Poe family.
“It’s been cathartic,” Poe Sheffield said. “I feel like we’re making some positive changes. We have different personalities and insights, but it’s been really nice not feeling alone in this. When it gets tough, we rally around each other.”
Poe Sheffield’s routine these days involves serving as part-time schoolteacher and entertainment director, keeping her young son occupied, and engaging with her daughter in Pokemon Go and, recently, rudimentary taekwondo classes via Zoom with Gilbert, who is a coach in California.
Having survived much, she cherishes moments like that May day in Colorado Springs when she rested her injured leg in her friend Esther’s lap as the world buzzed around them.
“I look back on it fondly,” Poe Sheffield said. “What Esther did was genuine. It was a magical moment. It was a beautiful day.”