Fencer Oh Sang-uk and chef Kwon Sung-jun turn out to be distant relatives

National fencing team member Oh Sang-uk and chef Kwon Sung-jun have been revealed to be distant relatives.

Sunday's episode of JTBC's Please Take Care of My Refrigerator was themed around the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games. Fencer Oh, judoka Heo Mi-mi and track and field athlete Biwesa Daniel Gasama appeared as guests.

Host Kim Sung-ju set the stage by announcing that "someone closely connected to Oh Sang-uk's family is here with us today," before pointing to Kwon as that person — a revelation that left everyone on set stunned.

Oh said he had only found out a week earlier. "Chef Kwon apparently visited the Jincheon National Training Center and told another athlete that he was my relative," Oh said. He then laid out an extraordinarily convoluted family tree: Kwon is the son of the older sister of the wife of the son of the younger brother of his paternal grandfather.

Kwon offered a simpler explanation: "Put plainly, he is the son of my great-uncle's cousin." He added that the two are roughly eighth-degree relatives — a description that prompted fellow panelist Park Eun-young and others to declare, "You're basically strangers."

Kwon said he had known about the connection for five years and felt a little hurt that Oh had only learned of it a week ago. Oh drew laughs by admitting, "I probably would have never found out if it weren't for this show. My father only told me because I mentioned I was going on Please Take Care of My Refrigerator."

Kim said he had asked an AI about the relationship, and it had replied, "You can consider them strangers." Kwon fired back to more laughter: "What does a machine know? Can a machine understand the bond between family?"

Born in 1996, Oh is the face of South Korean fencing's sabre discipline and has achieved a grand slam by sweeping individual and team titles at the Olympics, the Asian Games and other major international competitions. Chef Kwon rose to prominence as the winner of the Netflix show Culinary Class Wars and has since appeared across a range of television programs.