South Korean figure skater Kim Yu-Na during her free skate at the Pacific Coliseum.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The management company of 2010 Olympic women's figure-skating champion Kim Yu-Na has filed a protest after a Japanese television network aired hidden-camera footage of her at practice in California, according to various Korean media outlets.
Kim's mother, Park Meehee, set up the management company, All That Sports, earlier this year. Yonhap News Agency quotes an ATS official saying the group had registered a complaint with the Nippon Television Network Corporation and threatened to ban it from "all kinds of interviews and press conferences" in the future if it tries to film Kim without permission.
ATS asked for a public apology and also threatened to ask the International Skating Union and the Japan Skating Federation to impose sanctions on the network if such an incident happens again.
It is believed the hidden-camera footage was taken around Dec. 20, during a practice session at the East West Ice Palace in Artesia, Calif.
The footage initially shows Kim entering the rink with her coat over her head while a young man tries to ward off the cameras. There are fuzzy images of Kim skating with coach Peter Oppegard, doing some weight training and some jumps. It does not show her two new programs that she will use at the world championships in March.
The scuffle between South Korean and Japanese sports figures underscores the uneasy relationship between the two countries that is still felt years after Japan occupied South Korea in the early 1900s.
Kim and her archrival Mao Asada of Japan have been fighting for gold since they were junior skaters. While Kim won the 2010 Olympic title last February, Asada took silver and claimed the world championship a month later.
The Kim camp is also uncomfortable with rumours that Asada had asked to work with Kim's former coach, Brian Orser, and that a Japanese junior skater had begun to train at the Toronto Cricket Skating and Curling Club, where Kim skated before the split with Orser.
Kim's first competition this season will be the world championships in Tokyo, where she will skate her long program to Arirang, a significant piece for South Koreans. It is a sad song sung before and after wars to lift the nation's spirit.
-- Asada's march to the world championships in her own country has been fraught with disappointment this season, with an eighth-place finish at home at the NHK Trophy and a fifth at the Grand Prix event in Paris.
However, last Sunday, the 20-year-old skater won the silver medal at the Japanese championships to clinch a spot on the national team. The gold went to Miki Ando, who won the world championship the previous time it was held in Tokyo in 2007.
-- While the women's event in Japan was very competitive, the men's event was even more so. Reigning world champion Daisuke Takahashi finished third in the event, won by 21-year-old Takahiko Kozuka. Nobunari Oda, who trains in Barrie, Ont., with coach Lee Barkell, was second.
-- The troubled career of former world champion Brian Joubert is rumbling back on track after he won the French championship with 231.85 points (well short of the 251.93 Kozuka scored in Japan). Joubert took the short program with a quad-double combination that wasn't stellar, but young Florent Amodio got the better of him in the long, edging Joubert by 0.70 points.
Joubert did only a triple toe loop, instead of a quad in the long and made few mistakes, but achieved only a low level of difficulty on his final combination spin.
-- Who should surface at the Russian championships, which ended Sunday, but former Canadian men's competitor Fedor Andreev? The 2003 Canadian singles bronze medalist is now an ice dancer paired with former Russian world and Olympic competitor Jana Khokhlova. Born in Moscow, Andreev and his mother moved to Canada when he was 7. He holds dual citizenship.
At the Russian championships, Khokhlova and Andreev finished fifth in the short dance and third in the free to place fourth overall - a good start after being together only six months.