In Korean, her name means "treasure."
South Korean archer Ki Bo-bae has won her share of titles, but the team gold medal she captured at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics Sunday -- her third career Olympic gold -- may just be the crown jewel, a prize that punctuates her return to archery greatness.
Ki made her first international splash in 2010 by winning the team gold medal at the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games. She then became the double gold medalist at the 2012 London Olympics, winning both the team and individual title in her Summer Games debut.
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Park Hae-mook/The Korea Herald |
She also competed on the world championship-winning women's team and mixed team in 2013.
Yet just when it seemed nothing could stop her meteoric rise, Ki hit a rough patch. She missed the national team for the 2014 Asian Games in South Korea's Incheon, and was reduced to watching her former rivals from the broadcast booth as a color commentator.
She later said she learned a great deal by taking a step away from the range and observing archery from a different perspective.
Ki returned to the international stage the following year and won the individual and mixed team gold medals at the 2015 world championships.
She also made the national team for the Rio Games -- which is no mean feat considering the sheer depth of the archery talent pool in South Korea.
The consensus is that making the Korean Olympic archery team is more difficult than winning an Olympic medal. Case in point: none of the three men that won the team bronze in London -- Im Dong-hyun, Oh Jin-hyek and Kim Bub-min -- survived the national team trials for Rio. And Ki herself is the only carryover from the women's gold medal team from four years ago.
World titles are great, but athletes say an Olympic gold is the ultimate. Ki now sits one gold medal away from tying South Korean legend Kim Soo-nyung for most Olympic titles by a female archer with four.
She can do that with the individual title here on Thursday.
More history will be at stake: no woman has ever won back-to-back individual gold medals, and no archer, male or female, has won two gold medals in two straight Olympics.
After winning the team gold, Ki said she didn't want to think too much about adding the individual title to her resume.
"I am going to think about things that didn't quite go well today and things that I need to address," she said. "I don't want to have any regret in any of the matches. Even if I don't win the gold, I want us to sweep up all three medals in the individual event." (Yonhap)
