Kim Yu-Na skates with a licence to thrill as James Bond girl

How many of the truly global sports superstars currently at work are women? Who are the sportswomen today capturing the world's imagination, asks The Telegraph.

Maybe the remarkable Williams sisters, through sheer longevity of excellence, or Maria Sharapova, through glamour and brilliance, from tennis. Ditto, athletes Yelena Isinbayeva and Sanya Richards.

Take Thursday's announcement of the contenders for Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year. Beyond Serena Williams, there was skier Lindsey Vonn, swimmers Britta Steffen and Federica Pellegrini, and sprinters Richards and Shelly-Ann Fraser. Brilliant performers all, but not iconic.

So there is a yawning vacancy to be filled and, even while the engaging but embattled Vonn may be America's poster-girl choice, the Winter Olympics is poised to offer the role to a teenager already acclaimed as the most celebrated figure in her own land. For Korea, read the world if 19-year-old Kim Yu-Na skates as only she can in Vancouver.

When the ice festival last came to Canada a generation ago, Katarina Witt's interpretation of Bizet's Carmen confirmed her as a global sporting heroine in Calgary. America swooned at her beauty and brilliance and even a decade later, the double Olympic champion was still being voted as Uncle Sam's favourite athlete. Not bad for the Stasi's young favourite from Karl-Marx-Stadt.

Even now at 44, 'Kati' still casts a glow, as evidenced by her wooing the world's press at a promotional event here earlier in the week. Yet while too diplomatic to predict the 2010 champion, she could surely recognise in Kim a girl possessing her kind of grace and elegance while having also triple-jumped the event into the 21st century with a unique brand of effortless athleticism and rigorous technique.

Kim is, in some good judges' eyes, en route to becoming the best women's figure skater of all time. That is, if she isn't already. Her Canadian coach, Brian Orser, enthuses that the skating world now "just goes 'wow'."

But Korea fell head over heels long ago. The world champion they call 'Queen Yu-Na' is assigned two bodyguards everywhere, such is the clamour.

Even at her training base at the Toronto Cricket Skating and Curling Club, the mug shot of one of her obsessive fans is on the wall just in case he comes calling. For security purposes in Vancouver, she has spurned the Village for a hotel.

For two years running, Kim has been voted Korea's Person of the Year – in 2008, Barack Obama finished runner-up – and when she puts her name to something back home, it sells in profusion, like the 'Yu-Na Haptic' mobile phone, half-a-million of which were snapped up in 80 days.

She earned £5 million from prize money and endorsements last year, a figure set to mushroom as Olympic champion.

From Tiger Woods's PGA conqueror, Y E Yang, to Manchester United's Ji-Sung Park, to the short track speed skaters chasing four golds here, Korea is revelling in its blossoming sporting prowess.

Yet Kim is on a different level of fame to any of her compatriots; it is hard to imagine any other teenage sportsperson so concerned about her national responsibility during the recession that she explained last year: "People tell me I can be a source of inspiration in these difficult times and that gives me the extra motivation. I don't want to let anyone down."

She never has done but when she says "everyone recognises me, which is sometimes strange and a little uncomfortable for my family", it is easy to understand why being based for the past four years in Canada has helped release quite suffocating expectation.

Now, though, there can be no escape from the widespread assumption that she is in such a class of her own – her world record of 210.03 is a massive eight points higher than any other woman skater has achieved since the scoring system was changed six years ago – that her main opponent will not be long-time foe, Japan's former world champ Mao Asada, but, rather, her own nerve.

Defeat is not unthinkable, as Orser is well placed to keep reminding her, having himself gone into an Olympics on Canadian soil as favourite only to lose the "Battle of the Brians" with American Brian Boitano in Calgary 1988.

"I used to not think about pressure too much, but this season, especially it being Olympic season, I feel it," Kim concedes. And her uneven, occasionally mistake-riddled performances this winter have perhaps betrayed that weight.

Still, though, she has won her last five competitions with comfort and her stoic nature suggests she can cope. The child phenomenon who had mastered five types of triple jump by the time she was 12 would cry with homesickness when she moved to Canada with her mum to train under Orser. But the tongue-tied kid has blossomed, the confident exterior reflected in the assured star quality on ice.

She will skate in her short programme as a Bond girl, interpreting the fabled John Barry score, leaving her choreographer, David Wilson, to explain that the dazzling routine marks her completion of a three-year journey from "shy girl grown into a beautiful woman".

And by the time she finishes the pyrotechnics, posing there with hands imitating a pistol, he is adamant the sports world will be similarly shaken and stirred by the girl with the golden gun. And medal.

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