Figure Skater’s Mom Is Also Her Coach

Park Mi-hee follows her 16-year-old daughter, figure skater Kim Yeon-ah, everywhere. She even accompanied her daughter to her new school, Gunpo Suri High School, the day after Kim’s victorious homecoming from the World Junior Figure Skating Championships.

Park’s support has been an essential component in the making of her daughter into a junior figure skating sensation.

Park herself was once an avid skater who used to love putting on her skates and glide on Changgyeong Palace pond nearby her house. Park then got married, and her passion faded. But when her daughter Yeon-ah was 7-years-old, the family visited the new Gwacheon indoor ice skating link. Park’s passion flared anew. And seeing talent in her second eldest daughter Yeon-ah, Park introduced her to the world of figure skating.

Ever since then, Park’s life ash been attached to Yeon-ah’s. Other than technical training, which she hired a coach to do, Park personally took charge of her daughter’s physical training. Park keeps a stack of figure skating video collections at home, most of which she recorded by herself. Park also started sending her daughter to a two-month overseas training camp that costs 15 million won a year. The Korean Skating Association only started to lend support to Park’s effort just last summer.

Kim Yeon-ah went through some tough times as she became a pubescent teenager. “I just hated skating. So I argued with mom a lot,” said Kim Yeon-ah. But when Kim won her first international competition in the Grand-Prix, the storm passed. Park is now an expert who can easily pick out the problems in a figure skater’s move. “I’ve been watching figure skating for six, seven years. At certain point during those years, I knew everything there was to know about the sport,” said Park.

Mother and daughter resemble one another in many aspects. One hundred sixty-one cm tall and long-limbed, Kim takes after her father Kim Hyeon-seok’s physique. On the mental side, her nerves of steel come from her mother. After a dinner meeting with the school principal and education administrators from Gyeonggi Province, Park looked at her watch and said, “We need to go home and get her to do some exercise. She has been skipping for three days,” said coach-mom Park, as she makes to leave the table with her daughter.

Sung-Kyu Kim kimsk@donga.com