The Namyangju branch of the Uijeongbu District Prosecutor’s Office recently arrested and indicted Lee Kyu-hyeon, 42, a former figure skating national, on charges of violating the Sexual Violence Punishment Act. Lee is accused of sexually assaulting a teenage student he taught earlier this year. Lee, who has participated in the Winter Olympics twice in a row, including Nagano in 1998 and Salt Lake City in 2002, has been working as a figure skating coach since retiring in 2003. It was only a year or two ago that the government and the Korea Sports Council announced a comprehensive plan to eradicate sexual violence through the sports world MeToo (I also accuse), and a severe sentence was sentenced to a sex offender such as short track coach Jo Jae-beom. Still, there is nothing to say that the same thing is repeated over and over once more.
Lee is said to have denied the crime. However, in the past, he caused sexual harassment controversy by making physical contact with a young female athlete. At the 2017 International Skating Union (ISU) Figure Skating Junior Championships held in September 2016, she was even shown on the air as she wrapped up her teenage student’s waist and made unnecessary physical contact, such as patting her hips. In September 2005, she was arrested on charges of hitting a passerby with a vehicle and running away, killing him three times before drunk driving. I don’t understand how this person was teaching young students.
From the sexual assault case in women’s professional basketball in 2007 to the sports world’s #MeToo and Jo Jae-beom incident in 2019, the government and the sports world have come up with measures to prevent recurrence of sexual violence every time it occurs. In June 2020, when Choi Sook-hyeon, a triathlete national team member, committed suicide, the National Assembly conducted a fact-finding investigation, and even the president announced that he would break the cycle of violence and sexual violence prevalent in the sports world. After that, the ‘Sports Ethics Center’, which independently investigates corruption in the sports field, was established, and the Korea Sports University, which was designated as a hotbed of corruption in the ice world, was audited. A total of 63,000 student players were surveyed.
However, it has been confirmed that nothing has changed in this case. If sexual violence in the sports world is simply dismissed as individual deviation, the second Kyu-hyeon Lee and Jae-beom Cho will emerge. Recognizing that it is a structural problem combined with sexual orientation, the paradigm centered on elite sports needs to be overhauled. Not only do we want a leader who wields violence and sexual violence in the name of grades, but also the perception of parents who tolerate violence for college admissions needs to change.
