N. Korean athletes land in South for Winter Games

North Korean skiers and skaters arrived in the South Thursday to take part in the Pyeongchang Winter Games, setting the stage for a “peace Olympics” after a year of high tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Eight days before the opening ceremony, the 10 athletes were among a delegation that landed in Gangneung, on South Korea’s east coast, after a rare direct flight between the two halves of the divided peninsula – for which a special exemption had to be sought from US sanctions.

In black fur hats, they made their way through the terminal and onto buses without saying a word to a pursuing pack of reporters, while well-wishers outside held up banners depicting reunification flags – a blue Korean Peninsula on a white background.

“We are one,” read one of the banners.

The Games have triggered a sudden apparent rapprochement between the two Koreas.

In his New Year speech North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un expressed a willingness to send a delegation to Pyeongchang, setting talks and visits in motion.

The two Koreas in January held their first high-level talks for two years at Panmunjom, the truce village in the Demilitarized Zone that splits the peninsula.

Pyongyang agreed to send athletes, cheerleaders, officials and an art troupe to the South, and both sides decided to march together under the unification flag at the opening ceremony, and form a joint women’s ice hockey team.

Thursday’s arrivals – three crosscountry skiers, three alpine skiers, two short-track speed skaters and two figure skaters – will compete for the North.

They followed a dozen North Korean female ice hockey players who arrived last week and have been training with their Southern counterparts for what will be the first unified team in 27 years.

It has been accorded its own threeletter Olympic code, COR.