Such confidence, such enthusiasm, such pride! Pouting, jaw-dropping beauty on a lean muscular body. Those pecs! OMG!!! Real old school female muscle sex appeal.
Once seen, NEVER forgotten.
Or perhaps I should say once seen, watched again and again and again.
At the time, finding out more about who she was seemed a LOT less pressing to me than just playing the clip over and over and over and over and over until every expression, every pose, and every striation on every muscle had been committed to memory...
It turned out that she was a bodybuilder from South Korea and her name was Young Soen Jung (or possibly Young Sun Jung or some other variant - more about the challenges of researching and writing about Korean female bodybuilders for an English-speaking female muscle fan shortly). It was reported that she had been a former beauty queen who had traded in her tiara for a posing suit. The clip, it was said, dated from 2001 and was from a Korean national contest called Ms YMCA.
And there was, it seemed, NOTHING else of Young Soen Jung at all. This was the ONLY clip we had of her, and the only clip we were EVER going to have of her.
She was the Korean Angela Cilione!
A year passed. Two years, three. Then out of nowhere...
The same posing routine as the older clip, but in a different posing suit and from a different angle. And it's higher quality AND you get closer to the, er, action. And those pecs! OMG!!! I fell in love all over again as I watched and watched and watched...
I read on a forum that she had "retired", and assumed that would be that. Then, at the end of August this year, a BBC News story popped up in the FMS inbox. The title was promising: "Body Beautiful: South Korea's Female Bodybuilders".
Traditional views of South Korean women are being challenged by a growing trend for bodybuilding, it read. Designer clothes and plastic surgery are standard for many of the country's women, keen to replicate the slender physiques of celebrities and pop idols. Now a growing numbers of female weightlifters are going to different lengths to achieve their idea of perfection. And better still, there was video. I pressed play...
Guess who?!
Over a decade after she was competing (as far as I know), the BBC report brings us unexpected new footage of Young Soen Jung. She's training, she's speaking English, she's downing a "chicken shake", and - best for last - she's still got the on stage moves! And quite honestly, she hardly looks ANY older. (OK, maybe a bit older, and maybe the youthfulness is not 100% all her own work, but hey, forgive me if I start to gush a bit here, I do, as you can probably tell, find this woman rather EXCITING!)
And also pretty exciting is the news in the report that South Korean women are starting to embrace muscle building and "the healthy look", and turning away from the kind of devil work like calf reduction surgery that was previously so popular there.
So, in honour of Young Seon Jung coming back into my life - yes, I've been watching the report over and over again (especially the bit where she is doing her thing on stage!) - and in order to celebrate the country's female muscle growth, FMS is proud to bring you a week of our favourite female bodybuilders from South Korea (though none of them are quite as favourite as Young Seon Jung is, obviously).
Welcome to KOREAN WEEK!
[I should say that finding information about most Korean FBBs is an arduous task. One of the biggest problems I've found is the difficulty presented by Hangul (the Korean language), and specifically by the variations in its transcription into the Latin alphabet - in fact, I can't even be sure that "Hangul" is the correct transcription of the name of the language, because I've also seen it presented as "Han-geul"! Basically, what I'm saying is that you will have to forgive my ignorance about some of the women on the blog this week, ignorance that even extends to how their names should be written (both in terms of spelling AND in terms of order). I've had no choice but to go with what seems to be the most common transcription of the name that I've come across in each case, so there are bound to be inconsistencies. I can't even be sure that the title of the posts "한국인 of the Day" is correct!!! It's SUPPOSED to mean "Korean" (as in person from Korea) of the Day, but I could quite easily be wrong...]
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