SPORTS

What happened here, exactly? Let’s review five things we know now that we didn’t know before this first Olympic weekend began.

The president of South Korea made progress in his main objective.

Moon Jae-in’s job is not easy. He replaced a hardliner who was tossed from office after a massive public uprising. He advocates substantive engagement with the North — a stance that not only has significant opposition at home but requires him to dance delicately around the U.S. President Donald Trump, who has at times turned

his nation’s serious concerns about North Korea’s nuclear intentions into a sport of personally baiting his North Korea counterpart.

Like him or hate him, though, it’s hard to come out of this weekend concluding that Moon didn’t make progress. There he was with the delegation from the North at the opening ceremony, at a luncheon in Seoul, at a hockey game watching a joint Koreas team take the ice. And there he was with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence at short track speedskating, all smiles and handshakes.

At the Olympics that have such high stakes for his country, Moon is playing a delicate game of poker. On this hand,

he seems to be raking in the chips.

Once again, the Olympics are about more than athletics.

Despite the similarity in spelling, Pyeongchang is not Pyongyang. But one might be forgiven for concluding that given how the North Koreans stole the opening show with a deft hand clad in an unexpectedly velvet glove.

While Olympics have always included politics, or political events have at least popped up, Pyeongchang is unprecedented in the way it became a full-tilt platform for developments in international relations during its opening days.

This shouldn’t be unexpected. Sure, the International Olympic Committee

— acting in its own interests — casts the Games as a respite from real-world machinations. But anytime you’re getting a huge bunch of nations together for a festival of patriotism, adrenaline and bravado, you should expect some boundary-jumping into the messiness and delicate nature of humanity’s non-olympic pursuits.

The united states didn’t win the optics war this weekend.

No matter how you slice it, from the Asia perspective the Americans did not come out on top in the race to seize the narrative. This despite Pence’s emphatic pledge to make sure the Olympics didn’t turn into too much of a North Korea-sympathizing lovefest.