Jimin-hyung, who gave his parents a plane ticket to the Olympic host city for the first time.
There are four players representing other countries who stated in their official profiles for the Paris Olympics that they were born in Korea. Jimin Hyung
(37, Australia), who played for the Korean table tennis team, is a case of a foreign representative who went to the Olympics for the first time in his 30s. Jimin Hyung, who won a bronze medal in the women’s singles at the 2011 Shenzhen Universiade and played for the Korean professional team Ansan City Hall, decided to put down her racket in 2016 and went to Australia on a working holiday visa.
Jimin Hyung said, “I felt like I had lost the reason to continue my career as a player because I thought it would be realistically difficult to be selected for the (Korean) national team again.”
So, planning a ‘second life,’ he left for Australia and started club activities, picking up the racket again, and since receiving citizenship in 2021, he has been representing Australia in international competitions.
Guam Judo representative Maria Escano (22) also spent most of her life in Korea.
Escano, whose father is Filipino-American and whose mother is Russian, was born in Seoul, where her father worked as a military officer for the U.S. military, and first learned judo from Lee Jong-myeong, director of the Gyeonggi Judo Association, in Uijeongbu. Escano, who was known as the “Falcon of Seoul” while attending Seoul American High School in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, is currently pursuing her career as a judo athlete at Sendai University in Japan. Escano was able to compete in this Olympics as a representative of the U.S. island nation because her grandmother lives in Guam. Escano, a female 57kg athlete, lost to Mariana Estevez (28, Guinea) in the first round of this competition, ending her first Olympic schedule after just one match.
Lydia Ko (27, New Zealand, golf) and Audrey Kwon (18, USA, arctic swimming) are what are commonly called the 1.5 generation of immigrants.
Both players were born in Seoul and left Korea when Lydia Ko was six and Audrey Kwon was two. This is Lydia Ko’s third Olympics, winning silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and bronze in the 2021 Tokyo Games. This is Audrey Kwon’s first individual Olympics.
The three players who were born overseas but are representing Korea in this competition are all female athletes. Heo Mi-mi (22)
, a silver medalist in the same weight class (women’s 57kg class) as Escano, and Kim Ji -su (24), a representative in the same event (63kg class), are Zainichi Koreans. Heo Mi-mi, who was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan as the fifth generation descendant of independence activist Heo Seok (1857-1920), has been representing Korea since 2022. Kim Ji-su was also selected for the Japanese national team in 2017 and first wore the Taegeuk mark in 2018. Shin Yu-bin (20), a ‘squeaky-eyed’ girl, and Jeon Ji-hee (32) , a table tennis player ranked second in the women’s doubles world, were naturalized in China and have been representing Korea for 13 years since 2011. 바카라게임