Will North Koreans change their homeland?

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — When North Korean figure skaters Ryom Tae Ok and Kim Ju Sik took to the ice this week, cheerleaders chanting their names stowed the unified Korean flags they had waved at other events here at the Pyeongchang Olympics and whipped out their national flag.

After that unmistakable outburst of patriotic fervor, it was all the more incongruous when the pair began skating to a distinctly Western song: ‘‘Day in the Life’’ by the Beatles, in a cover by Jeff Beck.

‘‘I have no clue how they chose it,’’ said Bruno Marcotte, a prominent French Canadian coach. He worked with the pair, who placed 13th, for eight weeks last summer in Montreal and said their North Korean coach had selected the song. ‘‘I think the fact that everybody was like, ‘Huh?’ makes it even more special.’’

The musical choice seemed to belie the assumption that North Koreans, citizens of the most isolated country on earth, are cut off from knowledge of the outside world by the restrictions imposed by their autocratic leader, Kim Jong Un.

With 22 athletes and an entourage of around 500 cheerleaders, arts performers, journalists and security minders here at the Winter Games, the North Koreans have been subjected to endless scrutiny about what they are seeing here, and whether it is, well, blowing their minds.

More broadly, analysts and officials wonder if engaging with the outside world could have a political effect back home.

Those scuffling for information find only scraps. The North Korean figure skaters seemed to enjoy a variety of global food in the athletes’ cafeteria, said Kam Alex Kang Chan, a South Korean skater who also trained with Marcotte.

Megan Duhamel, who with her skating partner, Eric Radford, won a bronze medal in pairs figure skating and is married to Marcotte, said that the North Korean skaters became fans of protein bars made by a friend of hers in Montreal, and that she gave them several to take home.

In the locker room before a game between the unified Korean women’s ice hockey team and Sweden, some of the South Koreans taught their teammates from the North how to dance to K-pop music, said Sarah Murray, the Korean women’s hockey coach.

The subtext of some of the curiosity is whether the North Koreans, exposed to glimpses of popular culture or the higher standard of living in the South, might be tempted to defect, as athletes from other communist countries have done at previous Olympic Games. No North Korean athletes have defected in an Olympics, although one did in 1991 during a world judo championship in Spain.

Some analysts theorize that exposure to the outside world could eventually drive change back home.

‘‘It might be better to think that an information inflow will slowly alter the preferences of North Koreans by inevitably poking holes in the ideology,’’ said Robert E. Kelly, a professor of political science at Pusan National University in South Korea. ‘‘Over time, this should change the regime and make it easier to deal. That’s the hope anyway.’’