Pyeongchang breathes, bids Olympics farewell
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA » From volunteers to support staff to the joint Korea women’s hockey team, people from many cultures bid farewell to each other and to the 2018 Winter Olympics on Monday as a swath of the eastern Korean Peninsula readied itself for something novel: relative normalcy.
Seven years after a successful Olympic bid that changed its people and its landscape forever, Pyeongchang exhaled.
“Farewell! Bye bye! Gamsahamnida!” volunteers using the Korean word for “thank you” shouted to departing buses in Gangneung, the coastal city near Pyeongchang where many events were held.
Workers yanked down paper signs by the hundreds and busloads of Olympians, journalists and support workers rolled toward train stations and highways Monday in the aftermath of a Winter Games that was as political as it was athletic.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach echoed that sentiment in the closing ceremony Sunday night, saying that the centerpiece political event of the games — a joint Koreas team marching together and, in some cases, competing together was a beacon for a troubled world.
“With your joint march you have shared your faith in a peaceful future with all of us,” Bach said. “You have shown our sport brings people together in our very fragile world. You have shown how sport builds bridges.”
The Korean women’s hockey team did that for sure.
Thrown together a just few weeks before the games, players from North and South were thrust together to make a go of it. With the help of their Canadian coach, they came together as a competent, if not particularly effective, team that captured the attention of many Olympics watchers.
Along the way, they developed what they uniformly say was camaraderie, and even great affection. On Monday morning, at the athletes’ village, they said their goodbyes with tears and extended hands.
“I feel really strange,” said South Korean hockey player Choi Ji-yeon. “I told them to take care and not get sick and meet again later.”
She added: “If they were people whom we can continue to keep in touch and meet again, then I would feel better, but I might never be able to meet them again.”
Their governmental counterparts were showing signs of communication as well. The detente achieved through the Olympic connections between North and South Korea fits the longtime goals of the South’s president, Moon Jae-in, who has advocated engagement with Kim Jong Un’s Pyongyang regime.
That happened at the opening and closing ceremonies, both with U.S. representatives looking on from nearby — Vice President Mike Pence for the opening, first daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump for the closing Sunday night.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, a patron of South Korea and a loud opponent of the North’s nuclear program, is watching the contacts closely, particularly after South Korea’s presidential office said during the closing ceremony that the North was willing to hold talks with the United States.