In the end, it all got to be too much for Kim Ye-ji.
The South Korean pistol shooter who went viral at the Paris Olympics for her super-cool demeanor and futuristic eye-glasses collapsed in apparent exhaustion on Friday during a news conference back home.
The 31-year-old Kim won a silver in the 10-meter air pistol in Paris but failed to make the finals in her favored 25-meter event after taking too long to get her shot off.
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But it wasn't so much her performance at the Chateauroux shooting center that made her one of the breakout stars of the Paris Games. It was when a video started doing the rounds on social media of her setting a world record in Azerbaijan in May, with her steampunk glasses, black cap flipped backward, and a stuffed pink elephant tied around her waist.
Kim won the silver medal in the 10m shooting at the Paris Olympics.
Charles McQuillanTopping it all off was her inscrutability of her look to the camera after her victory, betraying just the faintest of smiles. Some saw her as a James Bond villain, others as a manga character or the heroine of a dystopian Ridley Scott movie.
“She should be cast in an action movie. No acting required!” said X owner Elon Musk, whose tweets always seem to get loads of views since he bought the company.
Kim herself is not a social media person. She told the Los Angeles Times she doesn’t have a Twitter account and has only posted a half-dozen times on Instagram. So she was entirely unaware of her viral fame until one of her coaches told her she’d become “a world star” and she learned of Musk’s tweet.
She took the newspaper through her outfit, which for her was entirely practical. Many shooters wear glasses with one eye blocked off, she said, because it relaxes the muscles. The cap helps keep the glasses in place. And the stuffed elephant is not, as has been reported, her daughter’s favorite toy but something she uses to wipe the grease off her hands as she loads new cartridges into her pistol.
Returning to South Korea, Kim headed to Imsil County, which she had represented in domestic competitions. But a press conference on Friday was interrupted when she collapsed, apparently in convulsions.
Video from the event showed officials swarming to help her and paramedics stretchering her away. A local official told Reuters she had briefly lost consciousness but denied reports that she had needed resuscitating by CPR.
He said Kim would stay in the hospital until she was fully recovered but was likely “suffering exhaustion” after the Paris Olympics.
