South Korea runs an unusual incentive scheme. Able-bodied young men owe the country roughly 18 months of military service, but athletes who win gold at the Asian Games — any Asian Games gold — earn an exemption. The polite fiction is that the medal is the point, and the exemption is a grateful nation’s afterthought. On Oct. 3, after beating Japan 1-0 in the football final at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games — Um Ji-sung scored the winner at Toyota Stadium, sealing a fourth consecutive title — several members of the team decided to explain, in some detail, that the fiction was fiction. “The reward of a military exemption — that is the one thing I played for,” forward Yang Min-hyuk (20, Westerlo) told reporters right after the match. Captain Lee Ki-hyuk (26, Gangwon), asked whether the medal felt heavy, answered: “I’m not going to the army.” He added that he had been nine days from enlistment had the team lost, “so I was desperate.” And then there was the youngest, Park Seung-su (19, Newcastle), who posted a video on Instagram of himself wearing the floppy reservist’s cap Korean soldiers don at discharge — the so-called “frog hat” — and saluting. A player who has never set foot in a boot camp, cosplaying as a veteran.
You can see the economics of it plainly enough. Of the 23-man squad, the 20 who had not yet served now get the exemption; a gold medal is, in effect, 18 months of a footballer’s prime earning years returned to him. Lee’s account of the locker room makes the same point: lawmaker Ahn Cheol-soo later quoted one player as saying that medals and trophies were not the point, and that the team had practiced with A Private’s Letter — a beloved ballad about conscript life — playing in the background, as motivation. It is hard to design a purer incentive response than training to the soundtrack of the fate you are trying to avoid.
The problem is that saying this out loud detonated the entire rationale for the policy. Fans responded, per the Chosun Ilbo, along the lines of “I doubted my ears.” Yoo Seung-min, president of the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee, said the remarks “do not fit public sentiment” and promised players would be taught to keep their expressions dignified. The footballers’ comments landed a week after the baseball final on Sept. 27 had already soured the country on Asian Games exemptions: a Korean team of KBO stars lost 5-0 to an all-amateur Japanese side before scraping a 3-1 win in the final, sending 16 un-served players home exempt. Noh Si-hwan (26, Hanwha), the baseball captain, answered criticism of the performance with: “I don’t pay attention to that kind of talk. Anyway, we won the gold.”
Foreign outlets have started describing the Asian Games the way one might describe a tax vehicle. The Yomiuri Shimbun listed the exemption incentive as the greatest strength of the Korean football team; when PGA Tour pro Kim Joo-hyung (24) won the men’s individual golf gold on Oct. 3, Golf Digest and other American golf media reported prominently that he had “solved the homework” of military duty. Some foreign coverage describes an Asian Games gold for a Korean male athlete as “a life-changing event” — which is true, though not quite in the way the organizers of an Asian Games presumably intend.
Politicians, sensing the wind, piled in. “A national football team that boasts about not going to the army — is the army a hate facility?” wrote Ahn Cheol-soo of the People Power Party, noting that a South Korean soldier had just lost an ankle to a North Korean mine on the western front. “Is a soldier who lost his ankle for his country a fool?” He called for scrapping the Asian Games exemption. Na Kyung-won said voters in their 20s and 30s are asking why players who beat amateurs go free when BTS served, and demanded the qualifying competitions and sports be redrawn. Former lawmaker Ha Tae-kyung called Asian Games baseball “a typically unfair contest” and urged abolition. All three players apologized on social media on Oct. 4 — Lee blaming “a moment of happiness, dopamine and excitement,” Yang saying his meaning had been miscommunicated, Park explaining that a fan had handed him the reservist cap and in his emotion he hadn’t thought about what it meant. Yoo Seung-min offered a structural excuse of his own: footballers and baseball players aren’t resident at the national training center, he said, so managing them individually has “limits.”
The obvious rejoinder is: of course they played for the exemption; that is what the exemption is for. A government cannot build a 18-months-of-your-life prize into a football tournament and then be scandalized that the prize motivated the footballers. What the players actually destroyed was the plausible deniability — the courteous pretense that they were risking their careers for national prestige and merely happened to collect the get-out-of-the-army card. The harder question, which Na and Ahn are now raising, is whether a multi-sport event where Japan fields amateurs and Korea fields professionals was ever a sensible place to distribute draft deferments. After the 2018 Asian Games selection row sent manager Sun Dong-yeol to a parliamentary audit, alternatives were proposed — “mileage” systems rewarding sustained national-team service, deferred enlistment for players still active in their late 30s. All of it went nowhere, as these things do. So the incentive stays, and everyone must simply rely on the winners having the good manners to lie about it.