“Garlic Girls” spice up 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics

Featuring a variety of fifteen sports, the 2018 Winter Olympics took place in Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province, South Korea this past February. Though the Olympic setting was initially a concern—in light of North Korea’s ongoing threats and missile testing—the event successfully fulfilled its motto: “Passion. Connected”.  Not only was a unified “Korea” hockey team represented, the world also witnessed the debut of Ecuador, Eritrea, Kosovo, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Singapore at the Winter Games.

Among all the bright spots of 2018 Pyeongchang, the “Garlic Sisters” reached out for an unexpected outburst of national and worldwide attention. The new faces of the Korean women’s curling team, also called Team Kim after their same surnames, included Kim Yeong-mi, Kim Kyeong-ae, Kim Eun-jung, Kim Seon-yeong, and Kim Cho-hi. They were also nicknamed the “Garlic Sisters” after their small garlic-producing hometown Uiseong. With the help of government funding, Uiseong managed to build a curling center in a local high school in 2006. Starting from Yeong-mi, the first to approach curling, her friend (Eun-jung), her sister (Kyeong-ae), and her sister’s friend (Seon-yeong) initiated their first try-outs for the rather unfamiliar sport called curling. All five of them graduated from the same high school, and their strong bond resulted in an impressive team play throughout the games.

The team also designed a new “Yeong-mi” language, where this single word denoted all of the rules of Curling.

A single word “Yeong-mi” replaced all the different rules for Curling in their team.

A single yell “Yeong-mi!” would mean “start sweeping”!

A longer yell “Yeong-mii!” represented “wait”.

And the interval of the bellowing of “YEONG-MI! YEONG-MI! YEONG-MI!” was a sign to stop sweeping entirely.

After the games, memes and playful parodies related to this chant and Eun-jung’s steely gaze scattered throughout social media, creating the so-called “Yeong-mi Syndrome”, which not only highlighted the fairly new interests toward curling in Korea, but also sparked interests into the girls themselves.

Before the final games, the vice-captain Kim Kyeong-ae said, “What we do is focus on one shot at a time, not on the strength of those we’re playing. One shot at a time.” They only lost one game out of nine before the semi-finals and earned a silver medal below Sweden.

Having watched the Olympics during the Lunar New Year Holiday, families and young Olympic dreamers alike became awed by the Garlic Girl’s unexpected success and began to increasingly enjoy watching Curling—a sport that used to be considered rather obscure. Their 10 years behind the scenes has made the Garlic Girls ready for this and engraved them into, quite possibly, an Olympic legend.

Featured image – South Korean ladies curling team rejoices after winning against Japan in the Olympics semi-finals Courtesy of Palsternakka via Wikimedia Commons