Kim (foreground), with members of the South Korean ice hockey team on January 10 at the Jincheon National Training Center. Image: Korea Ice Hockey Association

On July 6, 2011, four years after Sam Kim graduated from Boston College, South Korea was named host of the 2018 Winter Olympics. Kim heard the news at his home in New York City, took a shower, and cried.

He’d been coaching club hockey at Columbia University for $1,000 a year and peewees (ages 11–12) on Long Island. He was an administrator at a city-owned rink, and was coming off three years as the dragon mascot for the New York Islanders. Ice Hockey in Harlem had named him volunteer assistant-coach-of-the-year.

“I always wanted to do something that got me excited to wake up every day,” says Kim, a New York Rangers fan growing up on Long Island. The International Olympic Committee’s selection of his parents’ birth country felt portentous. Would this be his chance for a career at the rinks? He remained focused. In 2013, he collected a master’s in sports management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He directed hockey operations at a small college in nearby Springfield (on the Heights, he had been an administrative assistant for Eagles hockey) and served as video and statistical coordinator for the Springfield Falcons, a professional development team.

It was the dragon gig that opened the door. In the fall of 2012, former Islanders coach Scott Gordon gave Kim the phone number of Jim Paek—the Korean-born defenseman and two-time Stanley Cup champion with Pittsburgh in the 1990s. Kim called Paek, and they talked. When Paek became head coach of the Korean national men’s team in 2014, he remembered Kim and, in 2016, hired him as the team’s coaching video analyst. Kim’s office is 10 feet from the team’s practice ice.

Sitting in his small Seoul flat last fall, Kim says, “I can’t believe I’m here.” The decor is contemporary Olympics memorabilia, augmented with greeting cards from friends and, in the center of the bedroom, a green yoga mat. He uses the mat every morning for 30 minutes, a reprieve from sitting for hours before a computer screen. “See, I’m analyzing individual players’ postures,” Kim explains as he replays episodes on his laptop of a game against Russia from March. He wears glasses to block the blue light that he read interferes with sleep. They look like hip pink sunglasses.

In South Korea, speed skating and figure skating are more popular than hockey. And the national team has never qualified for an Olympics, until now by virtue of hosting. Kim devotes 80 percent of his waking hours to his work. He says he “wouldn’t change a thing.”

Haeryun Kang is a writer based in Seoul.