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Top US skier to meet lost South Korean father

US Olympic freestyle skiing medallist Toby Dawson said yesterday he had found his biological father and would be meeting him 25 years after going missing as a toddler in a busy market street in South Korea.

Dawson became an overnight sensation in South Korea when he won the bronze in men's freestyle skiing moguls at the Turin Winter Olympics last year.

After his Olympic glory, pictures of him beaming in Turin graced the front pages of local papers along with a shot of him as a sad small boy wearing a tattered shirt at an orphanage waiting for his someone to claim him.

He was abandoned as a toddler and later put up for adoption.

"I guess the necessary questions for me to understand [would be] why I was lost for so long and why I was in an orphanage and why the search wasn't a little bit stronger and efforts weren't a little bigger to help and come find me," he said.

DNA testing in recent weeks confirmed that a bus driver in the southern port city of Pusan, Kim Jae-su, 53, who had come forward last year after Dawson won his Olympic medal, was indeed his biological father.

"It's going to be exciting, and I look forward to meeting this man," Dawson said.

Dawson, 28, was adopted at the age of 3 by a pair of ski instructors in Colorado.

His upbringing by ski instructor parents helped him speed down the slopes, but he always faced an uphill struggle with his identity.

Dawson's olympic medal has earned him wide media attention in South Korea, leading many people to claim they are his real parents.

He had planned to travel just after the Olympics to the South to compete in a freestyle event. But he called off the trip because of the excessive hype and false raised hopes about his biological parents -- the latest in a series of disappointments after many others had come forward in recent years.

The South's Korea Tourism Organization decided to name Dawson as an honorary ambassador and he asked the group for support in his quest to find his Korean family. He learned three days ago in a phone call that his biological father had been found.

"I'm still unsure of exactly how I feel about it," Dawson said. "I've had some happiness, I've had a little anger, I've been excited -- I just keep kind of going through these different emotions."

He said at a news conference that he'd ask his biological father how he was lost as a child and why a more intensive search was not made for him.

Dawson said he was a shy child and wanted to be like everyone else.

"It's kind of been an uphill road for me ever since the beginning. My parents didn't look anything like me and all my friends' parents looked just like them ... I kind of stuck out like a sore thumb," he said."

Dawson retired in September, freeing him to seek out his roots. He said he would start a foundation to help adoptees and orphans.

"It's my turn to give back to these kids," he said.
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