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Pyeongchang Winter Olympics 2018
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North Korean women hold "unification flags" at Daegu Universiade Game in Daegu, South Korea. Seven months ahead of the Pyeongchang Olympics, many in South Korea, including new liberal President Moon Jae-in, hope to use the Games as a venue to promote peace with rival North Korea. To do so, the North’s participation is essential, but an ongoing nuclear tension and a lack of winter sports athletes in North Korea could ruin the attempts at reconciliation. (AP Photo/ Lee Jin-man, File)

Can Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang warm up frosty relations between North and South Korea?

The South wants next February’s Games to bring the countries together, but there’s plenty of obstacles in the way – not least the lack of decent athletes from the North

Tears and hugs after North and South Korean women won the 1991 team table tennis world championships. A standing ovation when athletes from the two Koreas marched together to open the 2000 Sydney Olympics. A selfie taken by a South Korean gymnast with her North Korean opponent that went viral at last year’s Rio de Janeiro Games.

Seven months ahead of the Pyeongchang Olympics, South Korea’s new liberal president Moon Jae-in hopes the first Winter Games on Korean soil could produce more of these feel-good sparks of seeming reconciliation and pave the way for deep engagement to ease the rivals’ 72-year stand-off.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has expressed his support for Moon’s overture while North Korea recently allowed its taekwondo demonstration team to perform in the South, the Koreas’ first sports exchanges since Moon’s May inauguration.

But there is also plenty of scepticism about Moon’s efforts because of a serious escalation in North Korean nuclear and missile arsenals – North Korea on July 4 test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile – and a weak North Korean winter sports programme that sent only two athletes to the 2010 Vancouver Games and none to the 2014 Sochi Games.

North Korea’s only IOC member, Chang Ung, said that cooperation on the Pyeongchang Games could prove hard considering the shortage of time and difficult politics.

What follows is an examination of South Korea’s attempt to make North Korea a key part of the Olympics set for February 9-25.

MOON’S PLAN

During a speech at the world taekwondo championship in the South that drew Chang and North Korean athletes, Moon appealed for North Korea’s Olympic participation while talking about the power of sports and citing the historic “ping-pong diplomacy” between the United States and China in the 1970s.

“I think [North Korea’s Olympic attendance]) would greatly contribute in realising Olympic values, which are about bringing humanity together and promoting world peace,” Moon said during the event’s opening ceremony on June 24.

Moon has previously said he wants North Korean athletes to visit the South by crossing over the heavily fortified land border between the Koreas – a deeply symbolic event that would excite frenzied media coverage. He has also proposed holding a pre-Olympic celebratory event at the North’s scenic Diamond Mountain, where the two Koreas once ran a tourism programme.

In this June 23, 2017 file photo, North Korean taekwondo demonstration team members and other officials arrive at Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, South Korea. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)

Moon’s sports minister, Do Jong-hwan, told lawmakers recently that South Korea was also studying a joint women’s ice hockey team with North Korea for the Pyeongchang Games. Other ideas: using a recently built North Korean ski resort as a training site and adding North Korea to the Olympic torch relay route.

During their meeting at Moon’s presidential palace in Seoul last Monday, Bach said he actively supports Moon’s push for Korean peace and said it’s in accordance with the Olympic spirit, according to Moon’s office. But some of the measures floated by the Moon government require formal IOC approvals, and Pyeongchang organisers say nothing has been officially determined yet.

In this April. 24, 1991 photo, Koreas' first-ever unified team player North Korean Li Pun Hui, left, and South Korean Hyun Jung-hwa play during the women's doubles event at the World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba, Japan. (Yonhap via AP)

Chang suggested it may be too late to try to field a single Olympic team, saying it took five to six months or 22 rounds of inter-Korean talks before fielding a single women’s table tennis team in 1991. He also questioned how much sports could impact relations between the Koreas.

“Did table tennis improve relations between the United States and China? Ping-pong was able to work as a catalyst because a political foundation had already been created. The world was saying ping-pong made things work, but that wasn’t the case,” Chang said hours after Moon’s June 24 speech. “Politics are always above sports.”

THE SPORTS OBSTACLES

North Korea is not strong in winter sports.

The only North Korean athletes who are thought to have a realistic shot at making the 2018 Olympics are a North Korean pairs figure skating team. Even if they qualify, it will mean less than 10 North Koreans – two athletes plus coaches and officials – would come to Pyeongchang.

This small squad – or no athletes at all – could make it difficult to create a mood of reconciliation. Still, South Korean officials are looking at other ways to get North Korea involved.
In this April 6, 2017 South Korea's Lee Eun-ji, bottom right, scores a goal as North Korea's Kim Kum Bok, bottom second right, tries to block the puck during their IIHF Ice Hockey Women's World Championship Division II Group A game in Gangneung, South Korea. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)

Pyeongchang’s organising committee said it’s discussing with South Korean government officials whether to ask the IOC and other international sports bodies to give North Korea special entries if no North Korean athletes qualify for the Olympics.

South Korea is also reviewing whether to hold out-of-competition matches during the Olympics that would allow North Korean athletes to compete, according to Moon’s Unification Ministry.

The South’s organising committee said special entries and extra games have not been allowed at past Winter Games.

THE NUCLEAR OBSTACLES

Relations between the Koreas are dismal as the North pursues its nuclear ambitions.

Since taking power in late 2011, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has conducted three atomic test explosions and ordered a raft of ballistic-missile launches as part of his stated goal of building nuclear missiles capable of reaching the continental United States. The North Korean ICMB launched last week could reach Alaska if fired at a normal trajectory.

In this undated file photo distributed by the North Korean government on May 22, 2017, a solid-fuel

Moon’s conservative predecessors responded by suspending major aid shipments and cross-border cooperation projects. But Moon has pledged to improve ties and promised to use the Pyeongchang Games to ease cross-border animosities. Even after the ICBM launch, Moon didn’t back down on his Olympic overture.

“When athletes from South and North Korea, and from the rest of the world, sweat and compete against each other, offer a hand to fellow athletes who have fallen down, and embrace each other, the world will witness peace through the Olympic games,” Moon said in a speech Thursday ahead of the G20 summit in Germany. “I look forward to North Korea’s active and positive response.”

South Korea's new president Moon Jae-in, left and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Photo: AP

But any big North Korean weapon test close to the Pyeongchang Games could trigger strong anti-North sentiments both at home and abroad and make it hard for Moon to press ahead with his overtures.

“What’s most important is that North Korea not act in a way that earns President Moon criticism when he makes a gesture of reconciliation,” said Jung Moon-hyun, a sports science professor at Chungnam National University in South Korea.

SPORTS DIPLOMACY

At the height of the Cold War, sports were another battlefield between the Koreas. North Korea boycotted the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympics, both held in Seoul.

But sports exchanges briefly flourished in the early 1990s before a nuclear crisis erupted. This cooperation included the North-South women’s table tennis team championship over China in 1991, and a unified world youth boys’ soccer team that reached the quarter-finals later that year.

These were the last unified Korean sports teams, but the rivals found other ways to cooperate.

After the leaders of North and South Korea met for landmark summit talks in Pyongyang in June 2000, athletes from the Koreas walked behind a blue-and-white “unification” flag for the first time at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Summer Games. This happened at other major international sports events, but the practice stopped after the 2007 Asian Winter Games in Chuangchun, China.

In this Sept. 29, 2002 file photo, athletes from North and South Korea march together, led by a unification flag during opening ceremonies for the 14th Asian Games in Busan, South Korea. (Yonhap via AP, File)

Despite terrible political ties amid the nuclear standoff, cross-border sports exchanges between the Koreas did not disappear entirely.

North Korea attended the 2014 Asian Games held in Incheon, South Korea. At the close of the games, three top Pyongyang officials made a surprise visit and held the Koreas’ highest-level face-to-face talks in five years.

This spring, North Korea’s women’s ice hockey team came to the South to take part in the group rounds of the world championships, while the South’s national women’s soccer team traveled to the North for an Asian Cup qualifying match.

South Korean gymnast Lee Eun-ju, right, and her North Korean counterpart Hong Un Jong shake hands and smile together at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Kim Do-hoon/Yonhap via AP, File)

One of the feel-good highlights of the Rio Games last year came when a 17-year-old South Korean gymnast named Lee Eun-ju took a picture with North Korea’s Hong Un Jong as they trained for competition. The photo captured global headlines, and Bach described it as a “great gesture.”

It’s far from certain whether Pyeongchang will have any similar gestures.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Could winter olympics warm up korean relations?
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