SEOUL (Reuters):

United States 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 someone to claim him. He was abandoned as a toddler and later put up for adoption.

Several people came forward after the Olympics to say they were his biological father.

"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.

Dawson, 28, was adopted at the age of 3 by a pair of ski instructors in Colorado. He said childhood was at times difficult because he often stood outin his adopted community.