South Korea: Trying to recapture the miracle of 2002

Before the 2002 World Cup, football wasn't as important as the Olympic Games in South Korea. It didn’t help that the Korean football team wasn’t any good really. But, with Guus Hiddink as coach, Korea went to a new level. We were very thankful. We even gave him a Korean name: "Hidonggu." Thanks to him, almost all Koreans became football fans overnight. Every restaurant had huge televisions and, when there was a game on, everybody was wearing the red shirt and waving the national flag.

Those days we only talked about football. In the history of South Korea there was never a sporting event with this kind of impact. Nobody was fighting because of their political views or their regional origins. We were all simply Korean.

Even though it's been 12 years since that World Cup, players from that Korean team are still popular. For example: Ji-sung Park is one of the most famous athletes. Myung-bo Hong eventually became the national team coach and Jung-hwan Ahn is still admired for his talent (and for how handsome he is). As football became more popular, girls stopped dreaming about attractive singers or actors, and started to focus on the World Cup players. I, for one, really liked Jong-guk Song, though now he is married, with a beautiful wife.

Many of us remember particularly the game against Spain in the quarter-finals. We weren't expecting to beat the Spanish side as they were the stronger team. But the game went on to a penalty shootout. The country was in shock. Everybody was holding their breath, nobody could even scream.

For my family it was the same feeling: even though we were very thirsty and our hands were sweating, we couldn't turn away from the TV. The Korean players were being watched by 48 million people back home, and they felt the pressure. But then Hong scored. Silence was interrupted by a crazy scream, which made us go out and run around the neighborhood in pure ecstasy. We were hugging all the neighbors, even if they were strangers. And the Spaniards, of course, wrote many criticisms because they thought they had lost because of a refereeing mistake.

But in the semifinal, Korea lost against Germany. Everybody was crying. Nonetheless, for the effort of the players, fans cried tears of happiness as if we were in a festival. Reaching the semifinal was too good for us, it was a miracle. After the World Cup, Koreans suffered like the aftermath of a disease. Everybody seemed to have lost energy. Nobody was using the red shirt anymore, it was out of fashion. We Koreans are known as a "pot," because we boil quickly and then cool down easily.

Many Koreans thought that the 2002 World Cup was a miracle. Beating Italy, Spain and the others seemed impossible. But we had the advantage of playing in our homeland, and it made our hope turn into happiness. The stadium, all red, made our hearts beat and when our huge flag appeared in the stands we cried, but not because we had won a game, but because such a small and weak country was able to reach such a level, and because Koreans had become one. At the end, we didn't care about winning or losing. There was a popular slogan back then: "Dreams come true!" And it was right. South Korea's dream came true.

*As told to Africasacountry. Yoon-he Kim is a language teacher and translator living in Bogotá, Colombia.