PYEONGCHANG: THE GAMES THAT LIVED UP TO THE IDEAL?
ARE THESE THE OLYMPICS THAT BRING KOREA TOGETHER, OR ARE WE BEING PLAYED?
Baron Pierre de Coubertin was a relentless optimist, educator and dandy, with a robust moustache and an irrepressible conviction that if the youth of the world could be brought together every so often to compete in sport, peace among nations would flourish and the planet would be a better place.
“Wars break out because nations misunderstand each other,” the so-called Father of the modern Olympic movement wrote in 1896. “We shall not have peace until the prejudices which now separate the different races shall have been outlived. To attain this end, what better means to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility?”
Here, then, was a noble idea. But like many noble ideas, what de Coubertin didn’t fully appreciate, or chose to ignore, is that the world he wished for was tethered to the real one. Where human actors lie and cheat and countries behave badly.
Despite the hopeful intent, since the Olympics were reborn in the late 19th century they’ve been synonymous with host nations blowing their budgets; wholesale corruption (Rio 2016); systematic doping (Russia now, the Soviet Bloc before that); grandstanding madmen (Hitler, Berlin 1936 — aka the Nazi Games); massacres of innocent athletes (Munich 1972); mass boycotts (Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984); and militarism (Sochi 2014, and the Russian invasion of Crimea shortly thereafter).
And then came Pyeongchang, a Winter Games hosted not in some safe, anodyne Euro/North American ski town, but 40 miles from North Korea, the home of a cartoonish dictator with nuclear capabilities, and taunted mightily to use them in recent months by an American president with a Twitter habit. Everything appeared ripe for another Olympics to go horribly wrong.
But in place of Armageddon, we’ve seen images of reconciliation, of two Koreas marching as one in the Opening Ceremony; of a unified women’s hockey team bawling its eyes out after its last game and saluting fans with the singular chant — Korea!
Forget about Canada’s record medal haul, Tessa and Scott, heroic snowboarder comebacks, crestfallen curlers, German hockey miracles and red mittens and toques. As the curtain falls on the Games — with a high-level North Korean delegation set to attend the Closing Ceremony and rumours of an inter-Korean summit — could this be the Olympics that finally lives up to the baron’s lofty goal?
Could Pyeongchang 2018 come to be remembered as the final shot in the Korean War?
“I think there is absolutely cause for hope here,” says South Korean-born, American-raised Christine Ahn, founder and international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing for peace in Korea. “Don’t underestimate the power of the two Koreas marching together in the Opening Ceremony, and don’t underestimate the power of seeing the North and South Korean women’s hockey team join together.”
Koreans still have a shared identity. They survived decades of foreign occupation before the country was brutalized in the Second World War and, finally, carved into its present halves by the Soviets and the Americans in 1948, a division that precipitated a three-year war ended by a cease-fire rather than a peace treaty.
Underlying this shared trauma, says Prof. Sung-Yoon Lee, a North Korea expert at Tufts University, is a pan-Korean “ethnic nationalism,” a collective belief that to be Korean, north or south, is to be exceptional and possess a common future. So when a divided Korea watched the two Koreas marching and competing as one at the Olympics, the deep-seated emotional messaging was: this is who we are meant to be.
“In terms of political theatre, it is very powerful,” Lee says. “It resonates among all Korean populations, young and old, men, women and children. It’s like a drug, an elixir, it’s mesmerizing.”
Lee also argues, however, that it’s a sham, an Olympic publicity stunt that Kim Jong Un — the third member of the Kim dynasty to rule the North since it was established — must have been overjoyed to join in. Doubly so during the Opening Ceremony, when television cameras and commentators could contrast the stone-faced, greyhaired American vice-president, Mike Pence, with Kim’s kid sister, Kim Yo Jong, shaking hands — and making nice — with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in.
In this tableau, North Korea, the crazy hermit kingdom, appeared as the grown-up, brokering goodwill with a woman’s touch, while Pence came off as a grumpy stand-in for the grumpy old American belligerent, Donald Trump.
“North Korea now has a bunker-busting, bias-busting secret weapon in the royal sister,” Lee says. “They have not had a woman’s face on this very unattractive North Korean state, and what she achieved at the Opening Ceremony was phenomenal. It was novel — and there is no antidote to it: you had a grimacing Pence and the smiling sister at a festive occasion in South Korea.
“That’s game over, in terms of PR.”
Prof. Lee is a month shy of his 50th birthday. He was born in Seoul, retains Korean citizenship, and spent a stint in his 20s in Japan, where he met several North Koreans. They drank together, talked, and the young academic believed they would be friends for life, right until his new friends asked him for $5,000.
The point of this story: Kim is a canny operator, and wasn’t playing along in Pyeongchang to play nice but to gain advantage, or stall for time, a tactic he learned from his dictator-father, Kim Jong Il.
Kim the elder finagled a $500-million gift (bribe?) from the South before the inter-Korean summit of June 2000. The historic meeting kindled hopes of reunification, and promises that the North would suspend its missile program.
Soon after, Madeleine Albright, the United States secretary of state, showed up in Pyongyang toting a basketball signed by Michael Jordan — since the dictator was a fan of the NBA — and left with a pledge to send $100 million a year in food and fuel to the North.
The optics were breathtaking. Peace seemed at hand, and the two Koreas marched as one at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia ... and again in Athens four years later ... and, again, two years later in Turin, Italy.
Alas, instead of playing ball, North Korea’s dictator/dynasty just kept on keeping on, and producing missiles.
“I have seen this movie so many times over the past 25 years, it’s almost predictable,” Lee says.
But what about the human factor, the Olympic intangible of youth, and the fact that the Games aren’t in Australia, Greece or Italy, but on the Korean peninsula, where a band of Korean women got drubbed in every hockey game, but also got to be teammates? Doesn’t the simple act of connecting with the Other matter?
The players seemed to think so. The South Koreans sent their northern friends home with photographs as gifts, so they could remember their time together.
“I remember having conversations with North Korean teammates in the locker room,” Han Soo-jin, a South Korean player, told the Yonhap News agency. “We felt awkward and tense with each other, but now there are no such things.”
Ahn, the peace activist, suggests that the best way to keep the Olympic momentum going would be for the United States and South Korea to postpone its annual joint military exercises in exchange for a North Korean pledge to quit firing missiles.
She adds that South Koreans want dialogue with the North, a desire reflected in president Moon Jae-in’s high (almost 70 per cent) approval ratings.
“There is a huge opportunity to keep the Olympic moment going,” Ahn says.
Lee isn’t so convinced. “For the 2018 Olympics to be remembered as a pivotal point in the advent of genuine peace in the Korean peninsula, two things need to happen before the year’s end: First, Kim Jong Un dies unexpectedly in a coup, illness or accident,” he says.
“Second, whoever assumes power in a post-Kim world makes the strategic decision to seek help from and, in due course merge with, the incomparably richer, freer and more legitimate South.”