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Breathtakingly dangerous. That’s how it felt to lock eyes with Yoo Joonghyuk from across the medical tent. It felt like the split-second before lightning struck, filled with the impatient coalescence of electrical charge. A chill he tried to ascribe to cooling sweat shivered through Kim Dokja as he laid on his cot, from the base of his neck to the tips of his fingers. The guy’s stare, rimmed with thick, dark eyelashes, seemed to bore into him with the sort of intensity you tend to reserve for your closest enemies.
Or in this case, the opponent you have to thank for ruining your chances at Olympic gold.
Yes, you heard that right, folks: Yoo Joonghyuk, the world’s darlingest Korean-French Taekwondo champion, was concussed out of the Paris 2024 podium by little old Kim Dokja.
Yoo Joonghyuk sat up on his own cot with what looked like instinctual rigid posture, still in his dobok (they both were—Kim Dokja yearned for shorts). He held an ice pack to the left side of his head, where Kim Dokja’s kick had landed. As Kim Dokja lingered guiltily on that ice pack, Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes, above severely carved cheekbones, narrowed at him. He looked like he was barely listening to the medics who swarmed him. They seemed to chalk it up to the concussion and were giving him instructions (even Kim Dokja could pick this up, despite not knowing a lick of French) in a tone typically reserved for toddlers or the particularly senile.
Without shifting his eyes from their perilous deadlock, and possibly without even blinking (Kim Dokja couldn’t tell—maybe they were blinking at the same time?), Yoo Joonghyuk gave laconic responses that, Kim Dokja could tell, were all forms of asking to leave. But was he imagining (hoping) it, or did he sound a bit… dazed?
He obviously hadn’t been dazed enough, back on the sparring floor. Yoo Joonghyuk had quickly returned Kim Dokja’s favor by tripping him into a career-ending sprained ankle—but seeing as Kim Dokja had been several-times-nominated the South Korean National Team’s “Most Least Improved,” this was somewhat less consequential.
It hurt like a hot iron to the connective tissue, though, and looked (from what he could tell before the medics swaddled it) like an overstuffed sausage. By the time he got brave enough to take the cast on and off for showers, it’d be black and blue. That was assuming he could even get in the shower.
Kim Dokja was not listening to his doctor, either. His world had seemed to shrink down to the straight-line distance between him and the man who would most certainly scorpion-kick him into the Seine once his gray matter bounced back. But a pair of crutches had been thrust into his periphery—Kim Dokja was free to go.
Free, if he could only manage to leave. Kim Dokja sat up and gingerly shifted this way and that on the cot, trying to swing himself off with as little lower-body movement as possible. He looked beseechingly for a second at the departing doctor’s back.
This was going to hurt. Kim Dokja took a bracing inhale.
“Do you need help?” said a deep, grudging voice from above him.
Why did he offer if he was going to be cranky? In French, Yoo Joonghyuk had sounded handsome and elegant, even concussed—on the other hand, he wielded his native Korean like a blunt object. Kim Dokja looked up to see Yoo Joonghyuk’s stormy face and outstretched hand.
“Aren’t you supposed to be lying down in a dark and quiet room?” Kim Dokja shot back, to buy himself time. He was thoroughly unsure of what to do here. The logistics of grabbing (holding!) Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand and pulling himself up on Yoo Joonghyuk’s stability (was he very stable?) alone seemed unthinkable, though physically very possible. Kim Dokja half-expected Yoo Joonghyuk to use the moment to slam him to the floor in a vengeful, well-justified takedown.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s arm remained extended, wordlessly.
Kim Dokja forwent the hand, and used his own to brace himself against Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulder as he rose onto one foot. Under his grip, Yoo Joonghyuk’s muscles were tense and warm through his shirt, though damp with sweat. Yoo Joonghyuk passed him the crutches.
His gait with the crutches was ungainly and laborious as he adjusted to them. It took at least five minutes from the cot to the threshold of the tent. Yoo Joonghyuk had taken his bag without being asked—he was apparently coming with.
But where were they going? Kim Dokja wasn’t sure. He needed to avoid his coach at all costs—Kyrgios was, with one-hundred-percent certainty, sulking over losing to the prodigiously tall and gorgeous coach of the French team, and Kim Dokja was not about to put himself in that line of fire. He also needed to avoid the ten thousand hungry cameras roving around the place, all primed to smack his sticky, sweaty, grimacing face up on Twitter or on the national broadcasting service of some country having a particularly slow news day.
Kim Dokja looked back at Yoo Joonghyuk. His eyes—a pale, lambent brown—were half-closed against the bright lights of the arena proper. His complexion was washed-out. He looked much worse than Kim Dokja had initially thought.
Kim Dokja led them to the empty back-most benches of the arena, high enough up from the sparring floor that all sound was somewhat dampened, and the lights glowed up at them distantly. He tried to lever himself carefully down onto the riser, ignoring the way Yoo Joonghyuk hovered, but let out an involuntary groan of pain as his injured foot contacted the floor.
Yoo Joonghyuk sprang into an attack of concern, helping to maneuver Kim Dokja so that he laid back on the riser, his ankle elevated on his duffel and the back of his head against cool metal.
“You should have let me help you down,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. It alarmed Kim Dokja to hear the tightness in his voice—the way he’d just moved, he’d probably made himself lethally nauseous. Yoo Joonghyuk shouldn’t have been fretting over him. They needed to navigate to safer territory.
“I’m sorry I gave you a concussion,” Kim Dokja offered promptly. “You were going to win gold this year.”
Yoo Joonghyuk scowled, sitting heavily on the bench by Kim Dokja’s head. “You wouldn’t know that.”
“You won it last time,” Kim Dokja pointed out. “And the one before that.”
The scary furrow between Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyebrows deepened further. Though looking at him like this, upside-down and from below, offset the threat of his presence a little.
“Anyway,” he continued, “Comfort yourself with the fact that I won’t be here to injure you, next time.”
He watched Yoo Joonghyuk decode the sentence with suspicion. “What do you mean?”
No matter how lightly Kim Dokja said them, the words still came off his tongue with a bitter aftertaste. “I’m retiring.”
Yoo Joonghyuk shouldn’t have cared. Kim Dokja was only one of many hurdles he had to clear every four years in order to win gold. But his face turned slack with shock.
“What?” Yoo Joonghyuk said airlessly.
“Retiring. This is my last year, Yoo Joonghyuk-ssi.”
He'd never really thought he'd win Paris in the first place—this was his last hurrah, a swan-song at twenty-eight. He was getting too injured, too frequently—this new sprain wasn’t surprising. Kyrgios had insisted on him trying his hardest this cycle, but Kim Dokja had been content just to qualify. There was no future for him in Taekwondo.
“You can’t.” There was that feeling of static electricity building again, as Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes searched his face demandingly.
"Have some pity on an old man, Yoo Joonghyuk. Not all of us can be as spry and nimble and virile as you."
Yoo Joonghyuk's face turned beet-red. His gaze flickered towards Kim Dokja’s injury. “I’m sor—”
“Don’t be.” Kim Dokja cut him off. If there were any two words he couldn’t stand to hear from Yoo Joonghyuk, it was those. “I’m going to recover just fine. I’m just getting too old for all of this.”
“I’m the same age as you,” Yoo Joonghyuk said fiercely.
“But I’m not you, Yoo Joonghyuk.” Kim Dokja let out a short laugh.
“You taught me,” the man retorted. “You taught me everything.”
Brain damage had made Yoo Joonghyuk too sincere. Kim Dokja found himself struck dumb.
Once upon a time, an eon before Yoo Joonghyuk was a two-time Olympic medalist, he was once a surly ten-year-old starting out at the very same Taekwondo school where Kim Dokja’s mother sent him to avoid his father on weekday afternoons.
Sweltering summer afternoons spent drilling kicks with Yoo Joonghyuk flashed through Kim Dokja’s mind, the thwack of their bony adolescent shins and ankles hitting each other echoed in his ears. Yoo Joonghyuk learned from him, sure, but he’d been a natural all on his own. They’d had an easy, roughshod grace with each other, the careless-but-not friendship of preteens. The memory was hazed with the young Kim Dokja’s secret, dreamy wish that it would last forever.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eye contact cracked him wide open. Kim Dokja put his hands to his face as he laughed helplessly. “You remember that?”
“I remember your hook kick,” Yoo Joonghyuk insists. The hook kick Kim Dokja had just, embarrassingly, concussed him with. “Of course I do. You taught it to me.”
After a couple of years of training, Yoo Joonghyuk had been scouted for a lucrative position on the French junior national team—and with a young sister to raise, there was no way to turn the offer down. Though Kim Dokja eventually followed him to the Olympics (with much less fanfare), Yoo Joonghyuk’s meteoric rise had set him apart—he was untouchable. Kim Dokja hadn’t known how to approach him. He’d only been able to watch from afar.
“Back then,” Yoo Joonghyuk said with slow, thoughtful frustration, “When we were young. Why did the French recruiter choose me and not you, Kim Dokja?”
Maybe this is why it felt so dangerous to regard this man. Maybe he wasn’t untouchable at all. Maybe, Kim Dokja had spent years avoiding Yoo Joonghyuk so he wouldn’t have to face this question.
“I threw the match,” Kim Dokja said hoarsely.
On the day she came, the recruiter had watched an exhibition match between the two of them. It had been easy to telegraph his moves, to block a hair too late. Yoo Joonghyuk had won.
“Why did you think you could decide what was best for me?” Yoo Joonghyuk was well and truly angry now, a growl like thunder in his throat. “Why did you throw away that opportunity?”
Kim Dokja wasn’t capable of handling this kind of rage, all raw and tender and hot. “You needed it,” Kim Dokja’s voice cracked desperately. “This is what you were made for.”
“I was made to compete by your side.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s face was inches away, leaned over with his elbows on his knees. The silence seemed to pulse with the blood in Kim Dokja’s ears and the synchronous throb of his ankle.
“I’m moving back to Seoul,” Yoo Joonghyuk croaked, heat gone from his voice. “I’m competing for Korea in 2028.”
Kim Dokja looked at him wordlessly. They were too old to dream like this. Yet the curious longing stretched out from the marrow of his bones into the very distal nerve endings of his fingers, which reached up to touch the feverish crest of Yoo Joonghyuk’s cheek.
“Kim Dokja. Let’s go home.”
—
On Twitter:
World Taekwondo Federation @tkd_international
A standoff between injured rivals? Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk share a heated moment after brutal double knockout!
[Image description: Kim Dokja lies on the bleachers in an arena, and Yoo Joonghyuk leans over him, speaking.]
olympic karate when????? @martialbrother
Replying to @tkd_international:
lol you can feel the UST through the screen
gold medalist jung heewon please sire my children @jhwpls
Replying to @tkd_international:
are we all seeing the way yjh is looking at him? i’m not imagining things, right? if only we could see kdj’s face
Sports Illustrated @SInow
Replying to @tkd_international:
No hard feelings about the injuries, for sure—great to see friendship bloom between two fantastic athletes at #Paris2024!