The disgraced, now former assistant coach for Korea’s national women’s curling team has been fired and slapped with a lifetime ban for verbally abusing his athletes.

The Korea Curling Federation determined in March that Choi Min-suk was found guilty of verbally abusing the athletes during a competition in Italy in December 2012. Though head coach Chung Young-sup did not engage in the abusive behavior, he was slapped with a five-year suspension for failing to return the unused portion of training grants given to the curling team.

“Using abusive language and misappropriating training grants are unacceptable, and that is why we came down hard on the coaches,” the curling body said. “We will develop measures to prevent recurrences of similar incidents and to better protect athletes‘ rights and interests.”

By Park So-eun (spark@heraldcorp.com)