Defections worst scenario hanging over Olympics
THE Unified Korean women’s Olympic ice hockey squad, with the weight of history on its shoulders, is facing practical problems encountered by few top-level national sports teams.
Its 23 South Korean and 12 North Korean members are strangers to one another, with only a fortnight to train together. But most fundamentally, they struggle to understand one another.
In seven decades of national division, the Korean spoken in the North and South has diverged. In Seoul, ice hockey players ‘‘pass’’ and ‘‘shoot’’ with a ‘‘stick’’, using the borrowed English terms. In Pyongyang they ‘‘yeol lak’’ and ‘‘cheo note kee’’ with a ‘‘chay’’.
To complicate things further, Sarah Murray, the South Korean coach, is a Canadian who speaks neither language. To dispel the confusion, the Korea Ice Hockey Association has created a phrasebook listing key ice hockey vocabulary in three languages.
It is one example of the challenges besetting the Winter Olympics, which open next Friday in the South Korean region of Pyeongchang. Both governments agree these Games are about much more than sport and represent a chance to begin healing the division and step back from military tension, which has threatened recently to erupt into war.
The rare coming together of North and South is, however, also exposing the drastic cultural as well as political, differences, and the potential for disastrous offence and misunderstanding. North Korea threatened to pull out once, after right-wing demonstrators greeted the visit of an advance party by burning their flag and a photograph of Kim Jong-un. South Korean conservative politicians, and a large number of ordinary people, are uneasy about extending a welcome to a totalitarian dictatorship dedicated to ruling the entire peninsula.
Perhaps the biggest potential catastrophe would be the defection of one of the hundreds of athletes, officials, journalists, cheerleaders, musicians or martial arts demonstrators from the North.
If it were to happen in Pyeongchang, the South’s liberal president, Moon Jae-in, would find himself in an impossible position, caught between the fury of Pyongyang and the jubilation of conservative South Koreans. Such a drama is in the interests of neither government and therefore unlikely, with 60,000 South Korean security personnel mobilised for the Games. The ‘‘officials’’ from Pyongyang will keep an eye on their young athletes and on one another.
Moon has made compromises. In South Korea it is a crime to display North Korean national symbols but Olympic rules require that the flags of all participating countries are flown, and an exception has been made. Every other national delegation will be greeted by a unit of South Korean soldiers. North Korea alone will be saluted by a civilian honour guard.
Only the female ice hockey players, the single joint Korean team, will compete under a ‘‘unification flag’’. Much of the symbolic success of the Games depends on the extent to which they can play co-operatively.
When the women from the North first arrived for training, there were reports that they were eating separately. But two of the North Koreans had birthdays on successive days; there were cakes and candles, and the atmosphere is said to have warmed up. And there is one word on which both sides agree: a puck is always called a puck.
The ‘officials’ from Pyongyang will keep an eye on their young athletes and on one another.
TIMES