SEOUL, South Korea—The so-called Garlic Girls who swept to fame during their stirring run to an Olympic curling silver medal have alleged they were verbally abused by a South Korean official and subjected to unreasonable orders from coaches.
South Korea’s sports ministry on Wednesday announced a joint investigation with the national Olympic committee into the allegations.
The five-member women’s curling team sparked unprecedented national attention for their sport in February before losing to Sweden in the final on home ice at the Pyeongchang Olympics. The team sent a letter to the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee (KSOC) last week to outline their allegations.
The women, from a remote province famous for its garlic, captured hearts in a country that barely recognized curling before and became sought-after models for commercials.
The attention was so great during the games that their coach took away their cell phones to shield the curlers from any pressure. The Garlic Girls ultimately lost to Sweden in the gold-medal match.
In the letter, Kim Eun-jung, Kim Seon-yeong and Kim Cho-hee as well as the sisters Kim Yeong-ae and Kim Yeong-mi accused former Korean Curling Federation (KCF) Vice President Kim Kyong-doo of verbal abuse and team coaches of giving unreasonable orders and subjecting their private lives to excessive control.
“The human rights of the athletes are being violated,” the athletes, the first Asian team to win a curling silver, wrote. “We’ve reached a point where it has become unbearable.”
The curlers also accused coaches of holding back prize money and trying to sideline captain Kim Eun-jung after learning of her plans to start a family.
The coaches “tried to rule Kim Eun-jung off the team after she got married in July,” the letter said. “They separated the skip and the team captain’s role to minimize Kim Eun-jung’s status on the team. They also tried not to include Kim Eun-jung in team training.”
The players that they no longer wish to work with Head Coach Kim Min-jung, daughter of Kim Kyung-doo, and her husband, Jang Ban-seok, who is mixed doubles coach. The coaching staff deny the allegations.
“Kim Eun-jung had a plan to have a baby, and as a coach, in that case, we need to think about having a new skip,” Jang said in a statement. “We’ve never trained in a way that would lead to a curler being kicked off the team.”
Jang also denied any funds had been withheld from the athletes, saying that the team had agreed that prize money would be spent on overseas training and competitions.
“We thought it was not right to distribute the prize money to each athlete for private use, because that money was earned as a national team supported by the KSOC and other sports organizations,” he said. “Besides that, money received from nonsports events was all paid to the curlers’ private accounts.”
The investigation will begin next week and will include officials from the sports ministry, the national Olympic committee and the team’s home province of North Gyeongsang.
CALGARY VOTERS: NO THANKS
CALGARY’S bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics was rebuffed on Tuesday when local voters said “no” in a nonbinding referendum.
Unofficial results showed that 56 percent voted against bidding for the Olympics. Results showed that out of 767,734 eligible voters, 304,774 cast ballots and 171,750 of those voted against the Olympic bid.
The city council is expected to address the results on Monday, but there is little doubt the bid seems dead. The council has already shown skepticism, with eight of 15 members voting on October 31 to scuttle the public vote. Ten votes were required for the vote not to be held.
The defeat is a huge blow to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has only two candidates officially declared: Stockholm, Sweden, and a joint Italian bid from Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. Both bids also face opposition and financing problems.
Three other cities withdrew earlier this year—Sapporo, Japan; Sion, Switzerland; Graz, Austria—and Turkey’s Erzurum was eliminated last month by the IOC.
The IOC was left in a similar spot for the 2022 Winter Olympics when numerous bidders withdrew. Only two unlikely cities expressed final interest, with Beijing, China, winning narrowly in an IOC vote over Almtay, Kazakhstan. The host for 2026 will be selected by the IOC in a vote on June 24 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Canadian Olympic Committee said in a statement it was disappointed by the results. Calgary was the host for the 1988 Winter Olympics. “The opportunity to welcome the world to Canada, where people can experience the uniting power of the Games and within our nation’s culture of peace and inclusion, would have offered countless benefits to all,” the statement said. “This would have been a unique opportunity for Canadians to be leaders in fulfilling the promise of a renewed vision for the Games.”
The results won’t be declared official until Friday. But the opposition was already celebrating.
“I think that people had enough of the establishment, telling us what to do, what to think,” local Councilor Sean Chu said.
Mary Moran, CEO of Calgary 2026, called the issue “very divisive” and said it was time “to put that behind us.”
“We really wanted this dream for Calgary to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” Moran said. “We learned so much about our community. We learned so much about each other.”
The Alberta government made its funding of a bid conditional on holding a vote and provided $2 million to pay for it.
Image credits: AP