Choi Ga-on and Yu Seung-eun Conquer Fear, Kim Sang-gyeom’s Triumph of the Human Spirit: "Thanks to You, I Was Truly Happy" [2026 Milan]

[Financial News] The flame in Milan has gone out. Now the world turns its eyes to the Alps in 2030.
At the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, the Republic of Korea won medals in only two sports: short track speed skating and snowboarding. In every other discipline, the team came home empty-handed.
The strong performance in short track, a traditional medal-rich event for Korea, was welcome. But the true stars of these Games were, without question, the snowboarders.
Medals do not tell the whole story, yet snowboarding has clearly moved beyond its status as a fringe, low-profile sport. It has firmly established itself as one of Korea’s new powerhouse disciplines.
Still, the emotion snowboarding gave us goes far beyond "winning medals" or "the growth of a sport." This is, quite literally, an extreme discipline where athletes put their lives on the line.
They launch themselves into dizzying air, as high as several floors of an apartment building, and spin more than 900 degrees. This is not a sport of gliding over ice; it is a sport of defying gravity and flying through the sky.

In Milan, the danger was not theoretical. World-class riders crashed onto the ice, suffering broken neck vertebrae, or were rushed by ambulance straight into emergency surgery. In the split second when they push off the jump, they must confront the horrifying knowledge that any mistake can lead directly to catastrophic injury.
Our athletes met that brutal fear head-on and broke through it with their entire bodies. Eighteen-year-old Choi Ga-on, who delivered Korea’s first-ever gold medal in a snow event, completed her third run despite enduring three separate fractures.



Yu Seung-eun also took a terrifying fall during the competition, making hearts stop across the nation. Yet she shook it off, got back to her feet, and returned to the slope.
Even after feeling the agony of broken bones, they tightened the laces on their boots again, suppressing the fear that they might crash once more. Their fighting spirit, in the face of that risk, is something far more sacred than any medal.
The same is true for Kim Sang-gyeom, the snowboard parallel giant slalom silver medalist who produced a stunning, against-all-odds finale.
In the harsh reality of an unpopular sport, he scraped by doing day labor to make ends meet, his hands hardened with calluses. The silver medal he forged with those hands became a perfect example of ‘human victory,’ overcoming the grinding fear of everyday hardship.


Throughout the Games, we watched their flights with our hearts in our throats.
Each time they crashed onto the ice, we felt the pain with them. Each time they soared back into the sky, we roared in joy at their side.
The public does not cheer them simply because they stepped onto the podium. We cheer because, even when staring down mortal fear, they refused to turn away and insisted on taking flight.
"You have truly been through so much. Thanks to your magnificent flights, launched from bodies covered in scars, these Milan Olympics were deeply moving and made me genuinely happy."
jsi@fnnews.com Jeon Sang-il Reporter