The Steep Price of Gold

Olympic archery gold medalist Kim Kyung Wook knows how demanding her sport can be. But nothing had prepared her for a training session this summer, which had little to do with bows and arrows. In August, coaches forced the nation's top male and female archers to attend a four-day Navy commando training camp at a military base in southwest Korea. Kim easily dealt with hiking along an open sewage ditch, sprinting with a car tire strapped to her back, floating for half an hour in frigid ocean waters and rolling commando-style in mud. But when coaches blindfolded her in the dead of night, took her to a crematorium and told her to fetch bones from the ovens, she almost lost it. Says the tanned Olympian, hard-muscled from using bows with a bone-snapping 17 kg of draw weight: "I cried out for my mom."

South Korea puts its athletes through some of the most grueling training in sports, and its archers may face the toughest regimen of all. Archers regularly go on forced moonlit marches. At past sessions, they have handled snakes, practiced nighttime combat-style beach landings and run up mountains while carrying boats. Physically demanding, the weird regime also hones the mental toughness archers need to consistently plunk arrows into a bull's-eye 70 m away. But a few athletes are fighting back, criticizing such workouts as not worth the risk. Midway through the August training camp, which was meant to prepare athletes for the Archery World Championship held two weeks ago in Beijing, four male archers suddenly quit. The Korean Archery Association responded by barring them from international competition for periods ranging from one to five years. Said Jung Pil Woo, head coach of the women's team: "We reprimanded them for the sake of the future of Korean archery."

It's certainly a proud legacy. Because of—or despite—the bizarre training, South Korea dominates international archery. Its women are by far the best in the world, having won every Olympic gold medal—team and individual—since 1984, when the country first competed in Olympic archery. Its men also consistently rank among the top medalists: they took three of the four golds last year in Sydney.

Such success, of course, begs a question: Are feats of courage, like trips to the crematorium, necessary to nurture champions? Kim still shivers at the memory of a 1994 episode when she and her teammates had to pick up live snakes and bite their bodies (gently). Kim was so frightened that her trainer had to hold the snake while she did the biting. A colleague, initially thinking the snake was rubber, slung it around her neck. She was about to kiss it when it flicked out its tongue. Says Kim: "She completely freaked out." So have some of Korea's sports doctors, who are appalled at the drills, which they say add to the stress top athletes endure. Says Han Myung Woo, an expert on sports psychology at Sunmoon University: "A month from the competition is not the time to be putting snakes around your body."

Korea's coaches defend the rituals, saying they help develop guts and steely nerves. Once upon a time, archery was practiced in silence. Today, the athletes compete in international tournaments with boisterous crowds. Coaches also want to keep the athletes from getting soft. "They think they can be the best without hard training," says Kim Ki Chang, head of the Korean Archery Association. Even Chung Jae Hun, one of the suspended archers, feels Korea should stick with what works. Repentant, the Olympic silver medalist now regrets quitting the camp: "It was a spur of the moment decision. I wouldn't have done it if I'd known I'd get kicked off the team."

At the Beijing championships, the women finished, as usual, in the gold. But so did the men who replaced the suspended archers and hadn't attended the grueling camp. Could that mean snake handling is overrated? No way, says Jung, the women's team coach: "That's like saying you don't need to practice driving because you managed to somehow get a license without studying." Note to next year's team: see you at the crematorium.