08/07/2024
PARIS—Kim Yeji might be the most intimidating athlete competing at the Olympics, and it’s not because her sport involves firing a pistol with deadly precision.
“She looks like the Terminator,” NBC shooting analyst Shari LeGate said.
People who wear glasses, traumatized by years of being called “four-eyes” on the school playground, have waited their entire lives for myopia to become fashionable. Corrective lenses have long been decidedly uncool—standard uniform for people with office jobs, not people who play sports.
But look around the Paris Games, and all you can see are athletes who can’t see.
Kim, a South Korean shooter, has emerged as an unlikely sensation, captivating the world with a cyberpunk get-up that makes her look like she dropped straight out of “The Matrix.” France’s Félix Lebrun, a bespectacled table-tennis phenom, has become more popular among Parisians than Comté and Cabernet Sauvignon.
Then there’s Stephen Nedoroscik, the pommel horse wizard who clinched the first Olympic medal in 16 years for the American men’s gymnastics team. When he’s not swinging around the apparatus, he wears a pair of chunky, dark-framed glasses for strabismus—a condition that can cause crossed eyes—and coloboma, a defect in the eye’s structure.
After his performance here, he likely has the most iconic pair of glasses in Olympic history.
“This,” said American Optometric Association president Steven Reed, “is going to make glasses cool again.”
Nedoroscik’s newfound celebrity is a boost for U.S. men’s gymnastics, which once tried to raise the profile of its athletes by flaunting their toned abs and broad shoulders. It turns out what they really needed to sell the sport to a wider public wasn’t sex—it was specs.
“I think if someone were to ask me, ‘What about you would eventually gain traction?’” Nedoroscik said after winning an individual bronze on the pommel horse, “I would probably say it was my eyewear or more my eyes—my diseases that I have.”
Nedoroscik used to compete in sports goggles, gifted to him as a joke by a teammate at Penn State. But giving up the rec specs might have been the best move of his life.
His sudden fame for his frames has been cemented by his habit of casually taking them off before he dominates on the pommel horse—suspiciously similar to how Clark Kent transforms into Superman.
Then, after performing impossible feats of his own, he walks off the mat, slips his glasses back on and turns back into a mild-mannered gymnast.
“It’s almost surreal to finally wind down after a day, a workout, and go on TikTok,” Nedoroscik said, “and see somebody made me a meme.”
While Nedoroscik’s glasses give him an air of geek chic, Kim looked more like a cyborg assassin sent from the future while claiming a silver medal in the women’s 10-meter air pistol event.
But the equipment that Kim and other sharpshooters wear on their faces serves an important purpose.
The blinder over Kim’s left eye keeps it covered without her having to physically close it while she competes, which can cause strain and distraction while shooting. Over her right eye, Kim has a lens and mechanical iris, which allows her to focus on the gunsights and reduce blur.
The charisma on display that was straight out of a “John Wick” movie was just a bonus.
Not all shooters use the special equipment, however. Yusuf Dikeç of Turkey won silver in the 10-meter air pistol mixed team event with a more subdued look that still generated almost as much attention. He nonchalantly fired off shots while standing with one hand in his pocket, leaving fans wondering if he was secretly some sort of trained hit man when he’s not winning Olympic medals.
The only thing adorning his face was a pair of perfectly ordinary glasses that could’ve been bought at a local LensCrafters. But he became such a hit here that when Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis broke the pole vault world record on Monday, he broke into Dikeç’s now-famous shooting pose during his celebration.
As for Lebrun, he won a bronze medal in his home country at the age of 17, proving once and for all that it’s perfectly acceptable—encouraged, even—to play ping pong in glasses. (To prove the point, Lebrun’s brother, Alexis, is also a glasses-wearing Olympian in table tennis.)
Lebrun has been wearing glasses since he was 9 or 10, and after training and playing in them for so long, they now feel natural, like an extension of himself. He has no intention of changing anything now.
That said, Lebrun did at one point consider trading the spectacles for contact lenses. The experiment didn’t last long.
“I tried one time,” Lebrun said, “and had a bad experience.”
Look around the Paris Games, and all you can see are athletes who can’t see—from pommel horse wizard Stephen Nedoroscik to South Korean shooter Kim Yeji.
