“Yes, I did complete my puzzle but it doesn’t mean that I can’t make another puzzle. I’m always looking for new challenges,” said Kim Woojin, on winning a fifth Olympic gold medal at Paris 2024.
Kim Woojin is a riddle, wrapped in an mystery, inside an enigma.
Most of us know that most elite athletes, especially in precision sports like archery win by putting their emotions to the side in one way or another, and focusing on the process – the draw, the setup, the release and so on. If you suddenly start reflecting on whether this is a crucial match or shot that will define your career, tension and fear will start sending the arrows a long way from the middle. The secret, it appears, is simply not to care.
Kim Woojin, more than any other athlete, seems to have refined this to a peak artform. His teammate in Paris, Lee Woo Seok, saw him first of all on TV as a young man and asked: “How does he do it? He is so calm.”
Nothing, it seems, has changed: the same grin, the same glasses, the same breezy relaxed attitude producing the same standards, year after year, shot after shot, and now decade after decade.
When he won last year’s Tlaxcala 2024 Hyundai Archery World Cup Final not long after the triumph in Paris, it seemed almost entirely routine – it was, after all, his fifth finals victory in total across 12 years.
He hasn’t always won, and his long journey to individual Olympic gold has been the rockiest road of all. But when Woojin really shows up – his remarkable, crushing World Cup Final victory in Tlaxcala in 2022 being a case in point – it’s over.
His three gold medals in Paris, adding to the two he had previously won in Rio and Tokyo, made him the most decorated Korean Olympian of all time – in any sport. He also surpassed, in purely medal-counting terms, the achievements of a string of legendary Korean women including Kim Soo-Nyung.
For the most decorated Olympic sportsman of an entire country, Woojin appears almost distressingly normal. We know he likes golf (a very common hobby among Korean Olympians, including several archers), and hiking. Since 2021 he has become a family man; married with a son.
But Woojin doesn’t like to say a great deal about what he does so well beyond the usual polite platitudes, and not out of shyness or arrogance (he has been significantly more talkative on Korean TV recently). There’s often a little dry humour, which doesn’t always translate, and none as dry – and accurate – as when he said in Paris “I think you can now call me the greatest of all time”, after winning the final match and the men’s individual title.
Of course, it’s a little too much to expect him to be gnomic and brilliantly entertaining as well. Lim Sihyeon was more illuminating talking about her mixed team teammate, again in Paris: “I have been on this team for two years, and Woojin is a really hard worker. He is really not complacent. That’s his greatest strength. I thought to myself, ‘I should become an athlete like him’.”
Whatever this season brings for Kim Woojin – we are assuming that he makes the frontline Korean team again, something the Koreans never do – perhaps no athlete in history has developed their talent and maintained a mental game across a generation, and made it all seem utterly effortless.
One final glimpse into Woojin’s world in Paris; when facing defending Olympic Champion Mete Gazoz in the quarterfinals, he was asked what he was going to do to prepare for such a high-profile, critical match.
“Nothing more, nothing less, just as I am, I’m ready,” the 32-year-old replied.
Quietly, it is a statement that perfectly sums him and his talent up; work hard, prepare as well as you can, and then just be, just execute without fear or regret. No-one has ever done it better.
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