10 stories

Sports

Football, baseball, esports, and the roar

Kim Do-young Needs One Home Run by 6 September. The Record He's Chasing Was Set by a Man Born on a Different Day.

Kim hit his 39th home run on 26 August with scouts from the Yankees and Texas in the stand. One more before 7 September and he takes the record for the youngest player in Korean baseball to reach forty. Then somebody checked the record-holder's birthday, discovered Lee Seung-yeop had registered a lunar date in 1995, and worked out that on the solar calendar the deadline expired in July. Korea's baseball authority has now ruled on which birthday counts.

12 min read

Sports

The Oldest Man at the World Championships Is 106. He Missed His First Event. Then He Set a World Record.

Seven thousand four hundred amateurs paid their own airfare to Daegu this month to enter a world championship anyone over 35 can join. Among them: a Thai schoolteacher who took up sport at 80 and is now 106, a Korean who vaulted at three Olympics and won gold on the same runway thirty years later, and a 90-year-old who finished last of six in the 100 metres while his granddaughter watched. The 106-year-old withdrew from his first event. On 27 August he threw a discus 7.59 metres, nine centimetres past the world record for his age group, in 33-degree heat.

11 min read

Sports

The Only Thing North and South Korea Own Together

In 2018 UNESCO did something it had never done: it took two separate national applications — one from Pyongyang, one from Seoul — and welded them into a single listing. Both would have passed on their own. The merge was chosen, not needed. And the two countries cannot actually wrestle each other: one fights on sand, the other on mats, and there has been no exchange between them since.

12 min read

Sports

In 2018, Korean Baseball Lost Its Walk-Up Songs

A KBO crowd sings non-stop for nine innings, with a different fifteen-second anthem for every batter. Then the composers noticed, sued — not over money — and all ten clubs switched off their walk-up music overnight. Nexen replaced twenty-six of its twenty-seven chants with public-domain art songs and fans said they sounded like funeral music. Busan didn't get its anthem back for five years.

11 min read

Sports

Korea Has Won 32 of Archery's 50 Olympic Golds — and Once Banned Four of Its Champions for Saying No

In August 2001 Korea's top four male archers walked out of a training camp after a single day, and the federation barred them from the World Championships. The system chose itself over its champions and kept winning. What Korean archery actually is — including the part where it is overwhelmingly women, and the village school that produced Kim Woo-jin is down to 33 children.

15 min read

Sports

Son Heung-min: The Nicest Man Carrying a Nation

How a boy drilled in the basics by his father in Chuncheon became Korea's greatest export in cleats — a Premier League Golden Boot, a military exemption won on a football pitch, a trophy at last, and now a record-breaking new life in Los Angeles.

10 min read

Sports

The Unkillable Demon King Goes to Paris: Faker, Korea, and the Making of a Sport

He is a six-time world champion who once got out of the army by winning a video game. As the Esports World Cup lands in Paris this month — its first-ever edition outside Riyadh — here's why Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok is the greatest of all time, and how Korea turned League of Legends into genuine soft power.

10 min read

Sports

Korea's World Cup Meltdown: How a 1–0 Loss Became a National Reckoning

Most countries treat a group-stage exit as a bad week. Korea treated it as a scandal of state. Within days of crashing out of the 2026 World Cup, the coach had resigned, the captain had issued a wrenching apology, the federation chief was gone, police were investigating, and the president himself had demanded a probe. Here's why a football result became a national reckoning — and what it says about how Koreans read fairness.

10 min read

Sports

From 2002 Hero to 'Incapable': Why Korea Turned on Hong Myung-bo

Twenty-four years ago he was the captain who took Korea to the World Cup semifinals — the first Asian ever to win an individual award at the tournament. This summer, after the worst World Cup placing in his country's history, he resigned as its coach while the President of Korea called him 'incapable' and ordered an investigation into how he ever got the job. The rise and ruin of Hong Myung-bo, explained.

11 min read

Sports

Why Korea Loses Its Mind for the World Cup

Every four years, the most buttoned-up country you know turns its streets into a roaring sea of red. Here's the story of the Red Devils, the 2002 miracle that started it all, the chant you'll never get out of your head — and how to join in while the 2026 World Cup is on.

11 min read

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