South Korean Olympic shooter Kim keeps cool over newfound fame

SEOUL, South Korea — When Kim Ye-ji first tried shooting at age 12, she could not lift the gun. Now, she is the world's most internet-famous Olympic shooter, thanks to her steel nerves — and Elon Musk.

Kim, 32, won silver in the women's 10m air pistol at this summer's Paris Olympics and captured the internet's attention with her nonchalant cool. But she told AFP that she fell into her sport by accident.

When her middle school teacher asked for volunteers to try shooting, Kim did not raise her hand but was selected anyway. Despite being too small to hoist the pistol, she was hooked.

"I thought it looked cool," Kim, dressed in an oversized black suit and heels after a commercial photoshoot, told AFP at a shooting range in Seoul. Her visit to the venue prompted gasps of excitement from other young Koreans at the firing line.

Her parents strongly opposed her taking up shooting, but "for three days, I didn't eat and just cried, begging to be allowed," Kim said. Eventually, they relented.

"I didn't have a clear goal when it came to my studies. But with shooting... I knew I had to be the best," she said.

She has dedicated her life to shooting ever since. In Paris, she said she had a "single goal — winning a medal."

She was not using social media at the time, viewing it as "toxic" and a distraction from training, so she was initially unaware when videos of her shooting started going viral.

At a photo session with other medalists in Paris, where journalists told her she had "a lot of Brazilian fans" and asked her to greet them in Portuguese, she started to realise something had happened.

"I didn't think of myself as special, and I still don't," she told AFP.

"There are many other medalists with lots of fans, and I just see myself as one of them."

The video that launched Kim to stardom shows her in an all-black uniform, a backwards baseball cap and wire-rimmed shooting glasses while taking aim and firing. After breaking the world record she barely reacts, glancing at her score calmly as the crowd applauds.

The clip, which was actually taken from a competition in May 2024, triggered an internet frenzy, with people hailing her "main character" energy, and Elon Musk calling