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The nonchalant attitude and cool swagger of shooters from South Korea and Turkey at the Paris Olympics have sparked a flood of memes on social media.
The internet has branded South Korea's Kim Ye-ji the "coolest person on the planet" with “main character energy” after a video of her participating in the Paris Games went viral earlier this week.
Kim, 31, secured silver in the women’s 10-metre air pistol event on Sunday. Her black tracksuit in contrast with a white baseball cap, Sauer pistol shooting shoes, and cyberpunk shooter glasses turned out to be a hit.
But the coolest part of her outfit was a stuffed elephant that reportedly belonged to her young daughter.
An older video of Kim competing at last year’s World Shooting Championships in Azerbaijan, where she secured gold in the 25-metre pistol competition, gained millions of views. In the video, she is seen casually breaking a world record with confidence and poise while wearing a baseball cap backwards with a ponytail trailing under the bill.
“No matter what you do in life, you’ll probably never look this cool doing it,” an X user called Aubrey Strobel commented.
no matter what you do in life, you’ll probably never look this cool doing it pic.twitter.com/ORjRhnI1hO
— Aubrey Strobel (@aubreystrobel) July 30, 2024
This week, it was Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec’s turn to steal the show by competing in Paris without much of the high-end gear used by his competitors.
A photo of Dikec, 51, shooting in a seemingly standard pair of eyeglasses and an impassive look on his face took the internet by storm.
His nonchalance prompted people to describe him with a range of monikers from “regular guy” to “hitman”.
Dikec and Sevval Ilayda Tarhan won the silver medal in the 10-metre mixed team air pistol shooting event on Tuesday, making it Turkey’s first medal ever in Olympic shooting.
Some memes contrasted Dikec with his Serbian opponent Damir Mikec, who was wearing a blinder over one eye, a lens over the other and a large pair of ear defenders.
Many shooters at the Olympic range in Chateauroux choose to wear visors to reduce the glare from lights or blinders over one eye to get a better focus for the eye looking down the sights.
It’s not quite true, though, that Dikec wasn’t wearing any shooting gear at all. He had yellow earplugs to block out distractions while he shot in the final. They just weren’t visible from the angle of the image which went viral.
Dikec has competed at every Summer Olympics since 2008, the Associated Press reported. He’s now looking ahead to the next Games: “I hope, next in Los Angeles, a gold medal.”
Kim is set to compete again on Friday in qualification for the women’s 25-metre pistol event.
The Olympic #shootingsport stars we didn’t know we needed.
— The Olympic Games (@Olympics) August 1, 2024
🇰🇷 Kim Yeji 🤝 Yusuf Dikeç 🇹🇷 pic.twitter.com/gfkyGjFg4I
“The Olympic shooting sport stars we didn’t know we needed,” the official Olympics account on X posted Thursday with pictures of Kim and Dikec.
