Upcoming Olympics revives shades of Seoul
Questions swirling on PyeongChang Olympics revive memories of Seoul in 1988.
Dave George: The 1988 Games in South Korea saw all kinds of crazy. Will PyeongChang be similar?
The PyeongChang Winter Olympics are a month away, and the whole two-week spectacle is taking place closer to the DMZ than West Palm Beach is to Miami.
What, in this age of reason, could go wrong?
The most optimistic answer to that one is to say the planet kept right on spinning the last time South Korea staged an Olympics, which just happened to be the 1988 Summer Games and happened also to be the first of many I have covered for The Palm Beach Post. The leaders of North Korea
and the U.S. weren’t on speaking terms or tweeting terms or anything else back then. That tamped down the hysteria but ramped up the mystery as the athletes of the world gathered in Seoul. More Cold War than hot mess, unsettling in a differ-
ent way than today.
Many of us wondered in 1988, for instance, if the communists to the North might blow a major dam on their side of the border, sending a murderous wall of water into the Seoul metropolitan area, where more people live than in New York. It was enough of a thought that the South got busy one year before the Olympics building its own barrier, the Peace Dam, to help contain the potential chaos.
What’s more, North Korea
boycotted the Seoul Olympics after failing to get the International Olympic Committee’s approval to move some small slice of the competition above the border.
At least in 2018, both Koreas will participate. Kim Jong Un, the miniaturized despot with the goal of collecting miniaturized nuclear warheads, has opened communications with South Korea for this specific Olympic season. You’d like to think that makes things a little saner over there, at least temporarily, but this is the same guy whose only American pal is Dennis Rodman, so how sane can it be?
My first memories of the 1988 Games involved getting used to soldiers, some of them clearly teenagers, stationed throughout the Seoul airport with automatic weapons in their hands. Don’t remember seeing any uniformed U.S. presence in the city, but the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and other American warships constantly patrolled the South Korean coastline, from the lighting of the Olympic torch to the dousing thereof.
Embarrassing to admit, but at one point the sudden sound of screaming voices caused me to race around the corner of a downtown building to see if a terrorist attack was underway. Turns out it was a bunch of gradeschool kids watching a relay race at a schoolyard playground. Laugh if you want. I did, somewhat nervously, and soon enough stopped fretting about such things.
As for the Games themselves, you’d have to jump all the way to Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, the topic of a two-hour ABC special this week and a new Hollywood film, to find a fuller bucket of Olympic craziness.
There was the overwhelming rush of standing near the finish line as Ben Johnson edged
Carl Lewis in the 100meter run, an exuberance quickly replaced by the panic of being alerted by a colleague at breakfast the next morning that I’d better catch the next bus to the Main Press Center. The rumors of a major announcement concerning “Big Ben” had everyone scrambling to a news conference where Olympic officials declared Johnson disqualified and his gold medal rescinded because of anabolic steroids found in his urine test.
Another day, Greg Louganis, the world’s greatest diver, hit the crown of his head on the springboard while completing a reverse 2½ somersault. By the time I caught a cab from covering another event, Louganis was back on the board, headed toward another gold medal with five stitches in his head.
Over at the boxing arena, a cramped space that seated just 7,500,
Roy Jones was robbed of the light-middleweight gold medal by judges who overlooked his 86-32 edge in punches landed and gave the fight to a South Korean instead. The only way it made sense was in realizing that five days earlier, a New Zealand-based referee had been attacked in the middle of the ring for taking points from a South Korean boxer because of head-butting. The riot that resulted inside the ring included local security guards kicking the referee rather than protecting him. Ugh.
I was there for the final race of hurdles icon Edwin Moses, who finished a disappointing third, and for the spectacular sprint magic of the late Florence Griffith Joyner. Had to look to verify that she won three gold medals and a silver at Seoul and set a 200-meter world record of 21.34 seconds that still stands. No trouble remembering those 4-inch artificial fingernails, though. Back off, Edward Scissorhands. FloJo coming through.
Altogether it was an amazing experience, and no doubt those who are privileged to cover the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics will feel the same way.
Funny thing about that capital C in the middle of that name, as shown in all the official Olympic banners. City officials changed it from lowercase once they were awarded the Games to make certain it doesn’t get confused with Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
Really, though, what else could go wrong?