Category Archives: korean olympics

Two Koreas and politics on ice

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When you get right down to it, politics is what animates the Olympics. The nationalism. The unwieldy clashes of divergent cultures, language and statecraft. The bald manipulation of the world’s most visible sporting event to sell a philosophy or legitimacy. The Games are Politics 101.

And that’s why the sudden, unprecedented agreement by the North and South Koreans to field a joint women’s ice hockey team suddenly adds relevance to next month’s otherwise mostly ignored Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

Just weeks before the Feb. 9 Opening Ceremonies, it was reported that roughly 65 percent of the Games’ one million tickets remained unsold. Here in the U.S., the lack of buzz over this traditional television hit series long ago raised the question of whether NBC, which paid $4.4 billion for the rights, would take a financial bath.

But now officials in North and South Korea have said their athletes will march together under one flag in the ceremonies—that has happened three times, at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games and 2006 Winter Olympics—and will form a combined team in women’s hockey, which never has happened.

Where such powerful gestures of reconciliation lead isn’t the least bit clear, but certainly worth watching. They finally could thaw relations between the hermit North and economically mighty South, technically still at war 65 years after a signed cease-fire. They could be a long-range North tactic to draw the South into reunification as a means to expel almost 40,000 U.S. troops that have been on the Korean Peninsula since the 1950-53 war.

Either way, they are not about hockey. They are, however, Olympian on several levels. Start with the Olympic ideal of international sisterhood and peace. And, while we need not get carried away with soft violin music in a messy world, a primary message of the Olympics is: Let’s all get together and play games. Modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin, in fact, prioritized the “taking part” over victory.

The way Olympic scholar John MacAloon put it to me once was that the Games are “sports in service of intercultural communication and a better world.” My friend Jay Weiner, who covered a handful of Olympics for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, called the Olympics “The U.N. in sneakers.”

I buy those lofty concepts. But with the realization that a central Olympic engine—the flag-waving, medal-counting national affiliations—play right into political schemes and scams.

Furthermore, weaponized links to the homeland often are entirely inappropriate, given the Athletes-Without-Borders reality at the Games. South Korea’s women’s hockey team is a timely example: Because hockey is not a major sport in that nation, its pool of talent is shallow, yet it was guaranteed an automatic berth in the Olympic tournament as the Games’ host nation. So, in preparation for PyeongChang, the South long ago went looking for help outside the country.

The coach, Sarah Murray, is an American-born dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada and former star player at Minnesota-Duluth. (Her father, Andy, is a former NHL coach.) Two Canadians and two Americans, all with Korean roots, are on South Korea’s 23-player roster. (Not an unusual situation. Of the 3,000 athletes in the 2014 Sochi Games, 120 represented a country other than their birth nation.)

Among the tricky parts now, though, is how Murray can integrate North Korean players into the South’s playing style and line rotations. And what the International Olympic Committee will do about expanding the roster beyond the 22 allowed in uniform for games. And how much protest there might be from displaced South Korean players and opposing teams. (The Swiss, South Korea’s scheduled opponent in their first Olympic match on Feb. 10, reportedly have said it is unfair to allow the South-North team extra personnel.)

In the end, though, all of this is decidedly Olympian. In MacAloon’s words, “That’s why the Games are interesting. They’re life itself. They mirror not just a dream version of life, they also mirror the things we struggle with.”

The whole deal fits, too, into the Korean cultural principle that order and harmony are forged from opposites. Perception is both vertical and horizontal, rough and smooth, dark and light, mountain and plain.

The Olympics is peace and war. But without the bullets.

Let the Games begin.

Korean Olympic choreography

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I just read the news today (oh, boy): South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, has publicly proposed forming a unified Olympic team with North Korea for February’s Winter Games in PyeongChang in the South. Even wilder: South Korean Cultural, Sports and Tourism Minister, Do Jong-hwan, has floated the idea of the North co-hosting the Olympics, with a yet-to-be determined number of ski events at the North’s new Masikryong ski resort.

“Pipe dream” is too mild a description. Any heartfelt longing to advance dialogue and reconciliation between the two Koreas, and the idea of doing so through the world’s most visible athletic festival, is certainly welcome. But the Korean War, after 64 years, technically is still on. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1953 but never signed a peace treaty, and just last month, Moon cited the “high possibility” of renewed military conflict over the North’s recent nuclear and missile tests.

The sports reality, furthermore, is that no North Korean athlete has yet qualified to compete in PyeongChang and, beyond that, officials in the North have not stated a willingness to participate in the Games. Choi Moon-soon, governor of PyeongChang’s Gangwon Province, told CNN this week that having the North host events is impossible, while Reuters reported that North Korea’s International Olympic Committee member, Chang Ung, confirmed that assembling a North-South team is unrealistic given the present political climate.

But the shadow boxing goes on—just as it did leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in the South’s capital, Seoul. Back then, North Korea spent more than a year angling for a role as co-host, demanding that it stage eight sports, which was then one-third of the Summer Olympic program. The IOC, keen to be the globe’s fence-mender, bent its charter—which stipulates that the Games are given to a single city—by offering to place three sports in the North.

As the point man in those IOC negotiations, then-IOC vice president Dick Pound experienced “something almost ritualistic” about the North’s bargaining tactics that was unrelated to real possibilities. “The North Koreans never seemed to hear what they were being told,” he said then.

A year before the Seoul Games, Pound reported that, when the IOC declared its final tender was three sports in the North, “North Korea said, ‘The latest offer is very encouraging progress toward putting eight sports in North Korea.’” The IOC nevertheless persisted with the talks because, “if you could get anyone across that border into North Korea to compete, into such an acknowledged trouble spot, it would really be special,” Pound said.

That still applies. But so does this: “South Korea,” he said, “could go up there and win a gold medal. That means that the South Korean flag goes up the pole in North Korea, and the South Korean anthem plays. And that’s unthinkable in the North.”

In 1988 as now, there were pockets of sentiment for North-South rapprochement, especially among student radicals. At the time, that passion manifested itself in regular, orchestrated demonstrations in which some students would hurl bricks and rocks at riot police, who answered with tear-gas guns and parcel-post-like trucks firing volleys of tear gas.

I witnessed one of those set-piece demonstrations on the steps of Yonsei University in Seoul with my friend Jay Weiner, then a reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. And, while there was nothing pleasant about being caught in a tear-gas storm, the whole scene—contained within a couple of blocks—produced more a sense of choreographed fervor than of real danger.

A quarter-mile from the most intense action, folks from the neighborhood sat under umbrellas at small sidewalk cafes and drank ginseng tea, and little children bounced on a mattress under a street overpass. Coughing, weeping women streamed out of the university gates, eyeballs and skin burning from the tear gas and their mouths covered with handkerchiefs. But a middle-aged fellow strolling along in his Hawaiian shirt shrugged off the fuss.

“You learn to live with this,” he said. “We Koreans love clashes, although I must say, I don’t think these students understand much.” One student at a neighboring university told us that the “joke on campuses is that these kids don’t want to take tests, so they demonstrate. And the joke off campus is that the radicals are ‘spring mushrooms’ who pop up each year and then get a job working for Hyundai after graduation.”

Those spring mushrooms continue to appear, and the Olympics has been a venue for the hope, however dim, of a reunified Korea. Though the North wound up skipping the ’88 Seoul Games altogether, there subsequently were two occasions at the Summer Olympics, in Sidney in 2000 and Athens in 2004, when teams from the North and South marched together in Opening Ceremonies under a flag with the generic map of the Korean peninsula.

In both cases, though, the North and South competed separately. And to read the news these days (oh, boy) is to be reminded that neither side has won the Korean War.