Kim Nam-gu

This week on our Oldest Olympians blog, we are going to be taking a look at our third sport shooter in a row: South Korea’s Kim Nam-gu, born October 8, 1923. We here at Oldest Olympians can work with many languages, but unfortunately Korean is not one of them. Nonetheless, we were able to do enough to produce an Olympic mystery for today.

(Kim, as pictured in the article described below)

Kim’s participation at the Games was limited to one event, the trap competition in Munich in 1972, where he placed 41st in a field of 57 competitors. He had more luck at the 1974 Asian Games, however, where he took home a bronze medal from the team trap shooting tournament. He also competed at the 1966 World Championships and, by career, was a successful businessman.

Our mystery here is simple, and likely related to our inability to work effectively within the Korean language. We located an article from 2007 about Kim, then aged 84, which highlighted his status as the oldest active shooter in the South Korean federation.

http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/PRINT/217268.html

We have been unable, however, to find any updates after this date, whether about his continued participation or his death, likely because his name is not an uncommon one in his country. A “last update” from 2007 is just outside of the boundaries where we would list someone in our charts as living, but usually such cases resolve themselves one way or another within a decade. Thus we are sharing this information with the internet in the hopes that someone may be able to locate additional information on what happened to him, and help us solve another one of our Olympic mysteries.

3 thoughts on “Kim Nam-gu”

  1. According to the Korean Shooting Federation, He died on September 25, 2013 In Tokyo, Japan. He was a Korean-Japanese. Here is the detail. http://bit.ly/2YdrcxJ (In Korean)

  2. According to the Korean Shooting Federation, Kim Nam-gu died on September 25, 2013 in Tokyo, Japan. He was Korean-Japanese. Here’s the detail: http://bit.ly/2YdrcxJ (In Korean)

    1. Thank you very much for this information! We will update our post and credit you for finding this!

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