An Olympic feel-bad moment as South Koreans lash out at speed skater teammate betrayal

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Every Olympics has a few feel-good stories.

This one has a feel-bad tale, a moment of televised cruelty that that has enraged South Koreans who have lashed out at what they are calling bullying in elite sport.

It began Monday night, when the three South Korean women in speed skating team pursuit reached the finish line in unusual fashion. The two at the front, Kim Bo-reum and Park Ji-woo, crossed in quick succession. They matched strides around the Olympic oval in tight formation, the way team pursuit is normally done – skaters moving as a single unit, drafting off one another as they complete six laps.

But this time it was only two people together. Far behind was Noh Seon-yeong, their teammate, who eventually reached the finish alone nearly four seconds later.

"It's unthinkable that there's such a distance between the athletes in a team sport like this," said Bae Sung-jae, a sportscaster on South Korea's SBS television network.

But Noh's tears after the race were ignored by her teammates. Then they blamed her for their seventh-place finish in televised remarks.

"We were skating well," Kim said. But, she said, "the last skater couldn't keep up and we had a disappointing score."

Park then jumped in, saying she had expected as much with Noh, a skater added at the last minute to the team. "It wasn't that we didn't think this would happen with Seon-yeong," she said.

South Korea is a hyper-competitive nation, and no Winter Olympic sport is more important here than speed skating.

But the wholesale betrayal of a teammate caused shock and prompted demands that the two skaters be booted from the Olympics. By Tuesday evening, more than 365,000 people had signed an online petition to the president's office calling for the removal of Kim and Park from the team, saying what happened was a "national disgrace," and describing the two skaters as possessed of a "personality problem."

South Korean law requires the government to make an official response to petitions that exceed 200,000 signatures.

Sportswear brand Nepa on Tuesday said it would not extend its sponsorship of Kim, which expires Feb. 28.

"The point of this discipline is to help out and push teammates. That's why people call it a beautiful sport. So this is really regrettable," added former speed skater and coach Jaegal Sung-yeol, speaking on SBS television.

The Korea Skating Union, which oversees speed skating, is responsible for an outsized percentage of the country's Olympic medals. But it is a controversial body, blamed for fostering a culture of coaching abuses and favouritism.

The Yonhap News Agency, in a Tuesday news report on the controversy also rapped Noh in its news coverage, saying she "fell far behind teammates, and failed to narrow the gap until reaching the finish line."

Noh made headlines in January when she was almost denied a spot in the Olympics, which she attributed to favouritism, but the skating union blamed on a paperwork mix-up. Noh said she wanted to skate to honour her late brother, a former short track champion who died of bone cancer. She only made the Olympics after two Russian skaters dropped out.

On Tuesday, Kim publicly apologized.

"I'm very, very sorry," she said, bowing in tears at a press conference.

She acknowledged causing "a lot of heartache for people who watched my interview," saying she felt "incredible regret."

Before race, "we all had agreed to shoot for third place," she said, and after the starting gun Kim had concentrated so intensely on hitting that target "that I did not take care of Seon-yeong who was lagging behind," she said.

"It's clearly my fault that I did not identify my teammate behind me when I was ahead."

But the focus on performance – and Noh's poor showing – only served to stoke further anger, as did the fact Kim admitted she had yet to speak with her teammate about what happened.

"Honestly, since I'm in a different room from Seon-yeong, I haven't had a separate conversation with her," Kim said.

Later Tuesday, Noh and her coach sparred over how the race had been planned, in a remarkable public show of disunity. But, Noh said, she intends to skate again Wednesday with the two other people who are, on paper at least, her teammates.

With reporting by Eunice Kim