For North Korean athletes, there’s a limit to friendship
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— It was just three sentences, translated, part of something bigger. North Korean skier Kim Ryon Hyang finished 59th and last in her first run at the women’s giant slalom and was disqualified for a false start in her second.
According to Yonhap, she talked about how Korean athletes “should not forget that the North and South share one blood,” and a belief “that our beloved supreme leader is watching me.”
And she said this: “I have yet to make friends (from other countries). (But) we’re going to be (friends). I’ve gained new experiences by participating in the Olympics.”
I told this to Meagan Duhamel, the Canadian figure skater who worked with North Korean skaters for nine weeks in Montreal before these Olympics. “Oh, that makes me sad,” she said. Me, too.
The North Koreans lived near the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, a soaring concrete relic of a bygone age. Duhamel would pick them and their minder up every morning to drive to practice or to her Pilates and stretching classes. She invited the North Koreans out to dinner; they said they did not want to interfere with her training. They smiled, held doors, loved skating, listened and offered affectionate hugs.
But Duhamel and her partner Eric Radford never got to know the girl and boy pair of Ryom Tae Ok, 18, and the 25year-old Kim Ju Sik. Not really. They learned the boy played the guitar and the girl loved the theatre and music. When Duhamel pointed out local landmarks such as Notre-Dame Basilica, Kim would say, oh yes, I know that.
“They know more than we think they do, I think is a good way to put it,” she says.
They were not given parameters of acceptable conversation.
But it had to stay simple, because it was complicated.
“We tried to respect them and not make them feel uncomfortable. And I think they knew what they could discuss and what they couldn’t,” said Duhamel, moments after a coaching session with the Korean pair at the Pyeongchang Olympics, after she and Eric Radford won bronze in the pairs and gold in the team competition. “And what they volunteered to talk about, we went with that.”
These Olympics have been extraordinary in their ordinary way, filled with the human spirit that drives the whole enterprise. Look at Chloe Kim, Ted-Jan Bloemen, Mikaela Shiffrin. So much more. The Olympics.
But they have been truly extraordinary for the careful threading of North Koreans into these South Korean Games. The insistent cheer squads, the displays of diplomacy. The figure skating pair, the combined women’s hockey team, 22 athletes in total. Most South Koreans had never seen North Koreans with their own eyes. Now this, on South Korean soil.
It has helped create a feel-good Olympics. There have been diplomatic overtures. North and South Korea both have turned down the volume on the propaganda/information they broadcast over the border through loudspeakers, sometimes literally. It is an Olympics of potentially big things.
But on the human level — well, the Olympics create human connections like nothing else I have ever seen, but there are limits. The cheer squads are bused to games with security and a police escort; they go to the bathroom in groups, counted on the way in and out, and housed at a racetrack hotel more than 100 kilometres away.
They cheer, laser-focused; they barely speak to one another and do not goggle at their surrounding. They are too well trained for that. In 2006, South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that 21 North Korean cheerleaders who attended sporting events in South Korea in either 2002, 2003 or 2004 had been sent to a prison camp for speaking about what they had seen. The cheerleaders are not here to make friends.
That leaves the athletes and whatever human connec- tions they can make seem to be limited. In 1991, a shared Korean ping-pong team was allowed to spend time together, to share secrets about their lives, to become friends. At least one North Korean from that team later disappeared. This time, North Korean athletes were housed in the athletes village. Some say they keep to themselves. But they are individuals, too. Duhamel says the skaters were given special black, grey and red Adidas tracksuits by the International Olympic Committee — how this squares with international sanctions remains unclear — and that the skaters were thrilled. “They were the highest-profile Kore- an athletes that were here and they were really proud of that,” Duhamel says. “Like, in the Olympic Village, we get a newsletter, and there was a big picture of them on the front page. And they were SO proud of that. They said, ‘Did you see? Did you see? The front page of the newspaper!’ ”
“At the end of the day, they’re all like us: They’re trying to live the best life that they can. They as people have nothing to do with any political situation. They can’t do anything about that. They’re trying to make the most of the life that they’ve been given.”
Radford says the North Koreans learned to better express on-ice emotion in those eight weeks in Montreal: to, as he puts it, “I think at the end, you could see true emotion: feeling it more, more genuine, just more sincere at the end. That’s what you’re trying to do all the time . . . when somebody skates with a sense of abandon.” Duhamel said that is in keeping with their personalities: the North Korean pair are naturally charismatic, she said. But they had to learn to express it.
And if they are political pawns, Duhamel says, they don’t seem to know it.
“From what I’ve been able to understand . . . it was my dream growing up to grow up and represent my country at the Olympics, because I love my country, I love being Canadian, I’m proud being Canadian,” she says. “And as much as I can understand, for them, it was the exact same. They wanted to represent the country they loved at the biggest stage in the world. And I think that when they qualified — they weren’t sure if they would be allowed to come here — they told us, we don’t know the political side, we don’t want to know about it. We just want to skate.”
North Korea always was going to be present at these Olympics, either literally or figuratively. It could either come and be part of the most truly global festival on earth — Summer Olympics excluded — or it could loom like the rationally lunatic hermit kingdom it is.
But North Korea is here. If you read the Washington Post’s interviews with defectors, one thing becomes clear: If the regime ever falls, it will be because a spark of freedom, of knowing life could be better, caught fire. No society stays sealed forever. So far, North Korea has tried to keep it removed with force and brutalism.
The athletes here are part of something bigger than themselves, far bigger. I guess we all are. But they are part of something that wants to keep them for itself, not to share them with the world. People are people, whatever their country.
But maybe it’s best if they don’t make friends.
“At the end of the day, they’re all like us. They’re trying to live the best life that they can." MEAGHAN DUHAMEL CANADIAN PAIRS MEDALLIST, ON NORTH KOREAN SKATERS RYOM TAE OK AND KIM JU SIK