Warm Ice
In regards to sports, to borrow an analogy about love, hockey was Sejeong’s “the one that got away”.
She loved everything about the sport except for one thing, the price. Money was the one thing that had kept her from playing the sport growing up. She could skate well, had excellent hand-eye coordination as seen in her playing baseball, she was strong and had a lot of endurance, but sadly, her family’s financial issues had made her not be able to play, even when her uncle offered to pay for her. She told him to give the money to her mom instead to help with bills.
Despite never getting the chance to play, her love for the sport had never diminished. With the Olympics coming to South Korea in 2018, she had really hoped that she was going to get a chance to go watch some of the games in person, but then at the end of 2017, she got the news that she was going to be training for TRC, so, unfortunately, that went out the window.
Settling in after a long day of practice, Sejeong had been looking forward to sitting down and watching a replay of the Korea and Switzerland women’s hockey match, despite how little sleep she had been getting anyway. What made the match especially intriguing was the fact that the Korean team was made up of a split squad of South and North Korean women. She knew it was unlikely they’d beat Switzerland, but the united Korea team was something she never thought she’d see.
The topic of these athletes from North Korea coming into the Olympics and sharing a team with the South Korean ones was a hot-button topic and Sejeong, not really one to mess around with politics, avoided talking about it for that very reason. That being said, seeing the team come together, in albeit a very lopsided defeat, was heartwarming for her, even with all of the controversy surrounding it. Yet again, she felt that hockey was something rather magical.
