Korean games town has bloody history
Until the Olympic Games arrived in town, the most extraordinary thing to have happened in Gangneung was in September 1996, when a taxi driver saw a dark shape in the water as he drove home along a lonely coastal road.
"It was like a whale - it was the size of a bus and a half," said Lee Jin-kyu about that night 22 years ago. "It was making a terrible engine noise, like a car that won’t start. I knew immediately what it was - I felt a chill, and the sweat ran down my back."
By the time the soldiers got there, the grounded North Korean submarine had been abandoned. Hunting down the sailors and spies who had been hiding inside took seven weeks and cost the lives of a dozen South Korean soldiers and civilians. The area around Gangneung, a quiet coastal town close to snowy mountains, was transformed into a battle ground, as South Korean commandos fought with the suicidally determined infiltrators from the North. Now the North Koreans are back - not as murderous adversaries, but as musicians, cheerleaders and athletes at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
Gangneung, 50 miles from the barbed wire and land mines of the border, is the venue for indoor events at the Games. North Korea’s young figure skaters, Ryom Tae-ok and Kim Ju-sik, will compete here, as will the Unified Korean women’s hockey team, the first joint Olympic team ever fielded by the two countries.
A third of South Korea’s 625,000 soldiers, sailors and air force personnel are based in Gangwon province, where Gangneung is located. After spotting the submarine, it took a few hours for Mr Lee to convince the police to take him seriously, but soon 43,000 of them were on the hunt for the North Koreans. The submarine’s pilot was quickly captured. A few hours later, 11 more members of the crew were found in the grimmest state imaginable.
They were lying in a row, their brains blown out by bullets. They were not bound - suggesting that, rather than risk capture, they had submitted to execution by the commandos whom they were transporting. From the talkative pilot, it was learnt that 14 of these remained at large. The effort to find them paralysed the region.
For more than a month, the town was under curfew. During the day, traffic entering and leaving the area was stopped and searched, and fishing boats were ordered to stay in harbour.
In the build up to the opening ceremony, there is no obvious sign of hard feelings. Opinion polls suggest many South Koreas have mixed feelings about welcoming representatives of the enemy, and there have been small protests - but the lottery for seats for a concert by the visiting North Korean orchestra was oversubscribed thousands of times. It will be held in the Gangneung Arts Centre, a short drive from Unification Park where the submarine itself is preserved as a monument.