North and South Korea will march as one at Winter Olympics opening ceremonies
Two Koreas will enter Winter Olympics under one flag
North and South Korea agreed Wednesday to march their athletes together under one flag at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics next month and to field a joint women’s hockey team. It was the most dramatic gesture of reconciliation between them in a decade.
South Korea, host of the Games, has said it hopes such a partnership in sports could contribute to a political thaw after years of high tensions. It came even as the prospect of war over the North’s nuclear and missile tests has grown especially acute.
The Games will begin Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and the women’s hockey squad will be the first combined Korean team for the Olympics, and the first unified team since their athletes played together for an international tabletennis championship and a youth soccer tournament in 1991.
The two countries’ delegations will march at the opening ceremony behind a “unified Korea” flag that shows an undivided Korean Peninsula, negotiators from both sides said in a joint news release after talks at the border village of Panmunjom.
The North will send 230 supporters to the Games, and negotiators agreed that supporters of both Koreas would root together for athletes from both countries.
The prospect of North and South Koreans cheering together offers a stunning contrast to the bombastic rhetoric of possible war from North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Donald Trump of the U.S., South Korea’s main ally.
Trump threatened the North with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” should it put the security of Americans and allies at risk. Kim called Trump a lunatic.
The Olympics agreement could help President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who has been pushing for dialogue and reconciliation with the North.
Few expect that the breakthrough will lead to a quick breakthrough in the decades-old standoff over the North’s nuclear weapons program.
But it provided a welcome reprieve for South Koreans who have grown both alarmed and weary over the tensions and talk of possible war in the peninsula.
The two countries also agreed Wednesday that their skiing teams would train together in the Masikryong ski resort in North Korea. The resort, a showpiece project of the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was opened in 2013.
South Korean officials said Wednesday that the North’s delegation would include at least 550 people, including about 150 at the Paralympic Games in March. But the joint news statement said the final number would be determined in Switzerland on Saturday, when the International Olympic Committee is to bring together North and South Korean officials. The plan is for the North’s athletes to enter the South over a land border Feb. 1.
So far, the only North Korean athletes to qualify for the Pyeongchang Games are a pairs figure skating team. North Korea missed an Oct. 31 deadline to accept invitations from South Korea and the IOC to join the games. But the international body has said it remains willing to consider wild-card entries for North Korean athletes.
A unified team of any kind at the Olympics would be a milestone for the Koreas, which have been bitter rivals in international sports as well as diplomacy and armed conflict, but which also have a history of trying to use sports as an avenue for reconciliation.
Moon proposed in June that the two Koreas form a unified team for the Pyeongchang Games, but the suggestion was not taken seriously until Kim used his New Year’s Day speech to propose dialogue with the South and to discuss his country’s participation in the Olympics.
That proposal led to a series of talks in Panmunjom between the two Korean governments. In an earlier round of negotiations, the North agreed to send a 140-member orchestra to play in the South during the Olympics.