Oliver Holt
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From Oliver Holt in Sydney
Esther Kim stood in a busy corridor at the State Sports Centre and said she was worried it was all her fault. She was wondering if the pressure had all got too much for her best friend and it was making her feel guilty. Perhaps the responsibility of trying to win for both of them, she thought, had terrified Kay Poe so much that she lost a taekwondo contest for only the second time in two years just when it mattered most.
Poe’s first-round defeat yesterday cost her any chance of the gold medal that she was widely expected to win and brought forth a flood of angry tears that she could not choke back no matter how hard she tried. That Esther Kim had caused Poe’s participation in these Games to be celebrated as the purest manifestation of the Olympic spirit was not in doubt. Nobody, though, least of all Poe, wanted to blame Kim. They just wanted to thank her.
Even Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee, wanted to thank her. He invited Kim here as a special guest of the IOC so that she could watch Poe’s preparations and feel as much a part of the Games as it was possible to do. Kim, after all, would have been competing in the inaugural Olympic taekwando competition yesterday had it not been for an act of self-sacrifice that ought to make her every bit as much a heroine of this fortnight as Cathy Freeman and Marion Jones.
Four months ago, Kim stood on the brink of seizing the last place in the US taekwondo team heading for Sydney. Against all expectations, she had secured a berth in the final of the Olympic trials and was anticipating fighting against Poe, her best friend for the last 11 years, for the right to go to Sydney. In the dying seconds of her last contest before the final, though, Poe dislocated her left patella. Even though she struggled through agonising pain to hang on to her victory, she had to be carried from the mat, unable to walk.
That meant that Kim had only to complete the formality of beating her injured friend to make her dream of going to the Olympics a reality. She said today that it took her only “a heartbeat” to do what she did next. In the frantic minutes before the contest was due to take place, Kim realised how badly disabled Poe was and told her that she would not fight. She said Poe deserved the place more than she did and despite all Poe’s protests, Kim defaulted. Poe, still stricken, found it hard to comprehend what had happened.
“It wasn’t really like throwing my dream away,” Kim said today after she had watched Poe’s defeat. “I was just passing it over to Kay. The ultimate goal in life is ultimate sacrifice and for the first day in my life I felt like a champion that day. Everything just came so naturally. I felt it was a personal message from God telling me 'this is the right thing to do'. I didn’t really have a choice because I felt it was so clearly the right thing to do.
“I have never regretted it and I don’t regret it now. In a way, I feel like an Olympian because I have experienced so much of what the other Olympians have. I have not actually physically competed but in a strange way I felt like I was out there today with Kay. I’m not sure about trying for Athens in 2004. I think maybe in one or two years, I will be done with this sport. I have given so much to it for so long, it would be nice to have a normal life for a while.”
In those circumstances, it hardly seemed to matter that Poe lost so unexpectedly today. The victory had already been won. Those who knew the story were willing the young American on, longing for her to win the gold medal that would have gilded Kim’s sacrifice and completed the fairytale. The reality was that the majority of the spectators in the arena appeared to know nothing about the signficance of Poe’s appearance.
They cheered resolutely for her Danish opponent and helped her rally from a two-point deficit by landing the kicks and punches to the body that drive the scoring system over each of the three rounds of three minutes. In the last moments of the final round, when Poe sensed what was supposed to be her destiny ebbing away, when Kim screamed her encouragement above the hubbub, it felt as if Justice had abandoned her mission and cast in her lot with brigands and dolts.
Poe found it hard to speak at all afterwards. She managed to say she had felt unsettled by all the media attention, that somehow she had felt inhibited about fighting in her usual aggressive style. She had wanted to play safe because she felt the lead she had built up was so precious after everything Kim had done for her. “I feel desperately low about what has happened,” she said. “Esther didn’t say much to me afterwards. She just hugged me and said 'good job'.”
Kim insisted that Poe had not let anybody down, that she had given her best and that was all that mattered. They had not been able to see each other in Sydney until now because Poe had been staying in the Olympic Village which was out of bounds to Kim, but last night they were going to go out together. “We have a very strong friendship and it will be nice to feel the bond again,” she said.
That bond was itself formed by taekwondo after the two girls started training together at the club run by Kim’s father, Jin Won Kim, in Mission Bend, a suburb of Houston, Texas. Mr Kim became Poe’s personal coach and she became his star pupil. He, too, was in Sydney yesterday as an IOC guest. His view of the gesture his daughter had made was the most lucid of all.
“That day at the Olympic trials,” he said, “there was one victor but two champions. One champion in taekwondo, one champion in life. I tell my students that it is more important to be recognised as a champion in life. When I first realised what Esther wanted to do, I was in shock and I asked her 'do you really want this'. That she made this sacrifice makes me happy because the main philosophy in taekwondo is being a champion for life. I said to Kay, 'Inside of you, you have Esther’s heart and soul'.”
