Kim impersonator wanted to meet cheerleaders
SOUTH KOREA: The man who showed up at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics opening ceremony dressed as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is not Korean, does not speak Korean and is not from either Korea.
In fact, the impersonator, who gave his name as ‘‘Howard’’, is from Australia and is of Chinese descent.
After getting the bum’s rush out of the opening ceremony along with his partner, a Donald Trump impersonator, he was back for the women’s ice hockey game between the unified Korean team and Japan. Again, Fake Kim was escorted roughly from the premises.
‘‘They dragged me away – they said for my own safety,’’ he said.
Apparently, officials thought Howard was trying to rile up the North Korean cheerleaders on hand – and indeed, he said that one of his goals was to ‘‘meet the cheerleaders’’.
The impersonator smiled and waved to the crowd before plainclothes officials from South Korea’s National Counterterrorism Centre moved him away from the cheerleaders, who he said had been doing a very good job.
‘‘This is seen as the peace Olympics,’’ he said, ‘‘so let’s hope that peace endures and those two idiots stop launching missiles and insults at each other on Twitter.’’
In North Korea, anyone impersonating a member of the ruling Kim family would be considered blasphemous. Images of the North Korean leadership are tightly choreographed and controlled by state propagandists.
Howard said he was briefly detained and then ‘‘politely asked’’ to leave.
‘‘My face is too political,’’ the dejected impersonator said as he walked slowly out of the ice hockey stadium.
‘‘I was born with this face, I’ve got to live with it.’’
Still, his entrance was so spectacular that the North Korean cheerleaders struggled to stifle a quick laugh in between chants of ‘‘We are one!’’ and ‘‘Unify the motherland!’’.
‘‘It shows you we’re human after all,’’ Howard said.