[The mounting political drama loomed over other Olympic story lines, including the participation of Russian athletes despite a ban after a doping scandal, and the appearance of the first Nigerian contingent in the Winter Games with a women’s bobsled team. And then there are the gold medal hopefuls, like Nathan Chen, the American ice skating prodigy who may seek to land five quad jumps in competition, and Chloe Kim, the teenage Korean-American snowboarding phenom.]
By Motoko Rich
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The
unified Korean team marches in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics at
Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium. Credit James Hill
for The New York Times
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PYEONGCHANG,
South Korea — The opening
ceremony of the 23rd Winter Olympics unfurled in frigid temperatures and high
spirits on Friday, as athletes from the two Koreas marched into the stadium
together less than 50 miles from the heavily-fortified border between their
nations, offering hope of a breakthrough in a tense, geopolitical standoff that
has stirred fears of nuclear conflict.
The festivities started what organizers say
is the largest Winter Olympics yet, with 92 countries participating. The North
and South Korean delegations, marching under one flag, embodied the hopes of a
peninsula divided by history and ideology.
Whereas recent Olympic Games have sought to
set politics to one side, the strategic subtext of the event in Pyeongchang
this year has been unavoidable.
Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of Kim
Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, was sitting at the opening ceremony closely
behind Vice President Mike Pence, who led the American delegation. Also present
was the father of Otto Warmbier, the American student who was jailed in North
Korea last year, returned home in a coma and died shortly afterward.
Earlier in the week, the United States warned
against a North Korean charm offensive and announced plans to impose its
toughest sanctions yet against Pyongyang, which staged a military parade
featuring ICBMs just a day before the Games opened.
The mounting political drama loomed over
other Olympic story lines, including the participation of Russian athletes
despite a ban after a doping scandal, and the appearance of the first Nigerian
contingent in the Winter Games with a women’s bobsled team. And then there are
the gold medal hopefuls, like Nathan Chen, the American ice skating prodigy who
may seek to land five quad jumps in competition, and Chloe Kim, the teenage
Korean-American snowboarding phenom.
And as if there were not enough distractions
already, a worsening outbreak of the highly contagious norovirus has been
spreading from security personnel to other Olympic workers.
In the prelude to the opening ceremony, North
Korea dominated the news cycle. For the month since North Korea agreed to send
22 athletes and an entourage of artistic performers and dignitaries to the
Games, the news media has been riveted by an advance visit by one of North
Korea’s most celebrated pop stars, the arrival of North Korean cheerleaders in
matching red wool coats, and controversies over whether the North’s
participation in the Olympics would violate international sanctions punishing
North Korea for its nuclear weapons development.
And Mr. Pence’s visit — which included a
meeting Friday with North Korean defectors — exposed deepening strains in ties
between the longtime allies, as he suggested that South Korea curtail ties to
the North after the Olympics end. Mr. Pence also did not attend a state dinner
near the Olympics site, which meant he avoided spending time with the North
Korean delegation.
But South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in,
seems to see the Games as central to his effort to proactively engage North
Korea and persuade the reclusive country to enter into negotiations to scale
back its nuclear and ballistic missile program.
“Many considered it an impossible dream to
have an Olympics of peace, in which North Korea would participate and the two
Koreas would form a joint team,” Mr. Moon said in an address to the
International Olympic Committee this week.
Friday’s opening ceremony, directed by Song
Seung-whan, a South Korean actor and popular theatrical creator, sought to
project a vision of unification and peace on the long-divided peninsula.
“As a starting point, Korea is the only
divided country in the world,” Mr. Song said in an interview hours before the
ceremony began. He said that even though North Korea was not expected to attend
when he began planning the ceremony’s themes, “we started with peace in mind.”
“Of course it was a surprise,” he said of the
North’s decision to join the Games. “It will be an opportunity for the peace we
were thinking of to be shown to the world in a more deep way.”
Although athletes from the two Koreas marched
under a unified flag, a group of traditionally-dressed dancers and drummers formed
the shape of the Taegeuk, the traditional pattern that appears on the South
Korean flag. And a paean to technological developments in artificial
intelligence highlighted South Korean achievements.
A backlash against the last-minute
participation of North Korea, particularly the addition of a dozen North Korean
women’s ice hockey players onto the roster of the South Korean team, cast a
shadow over a moment that was meant to exemplify unity.
“Instead of paying attention to all of the
excellent athletes who are coming from all over the world, we are paying all
our attention to the inter-Korean women’s hockey team,” Elisa Lee, a former
table tennis champion and coach for South Korea and a former member of the
National Assembly, said in an interview this week in Seoul. “I think it’s a
little bit unfortunate.”
Critics also feared that in seeking better
ties with North Korea, Mr. Moon had compromised too much.
“Bending to a dictator like Kim Jong-un is in
conflict with the dignity” of South Koreans, wrote Yoon Pyung-joong, a
professor of political philosophy at Hanshin University, in an editorial this
month in Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean daily. “The crisis on the Korean Peninsula
does not get resolved with a one-off event like sports games or an inter-Korean
summit meeting.”
But the emotion of watching the Koreas march
under the same flag moved some spectators. More than 100 South Koreans watching
on a live stream on a screen in central Seoul applauded and cheered while
watching that moment.
Kim Tae-yoon, 21, a media studies student
from Cheonan, said that he had been dubious about the North Koreans
participating in the games.
“I wondered whether any of our efforts would
be a step towards unification when we could very well just be used for North
Korean propaganda,” Mr. Kim said. “But the two Koreas marching together looked
good. I hope that the Pyeongchang Olympics will be remembered as one where we
showed the world that we communicated well with North Korea.”
Perhaps the most stirring moment of the
evening came when the penultimate torch bearers were revealed as Chung Su-hyon,
a North Korean player for the unified Korean hockey team, and Park Jong-ah, a
South Korean player. The pair carried the torch up the final flight of steps
and handed it off to Yuna Kim, the profoundly popular South Korean figure
skater who won the gold medal in 2010 and the silver medal in 2014.
This event was not the first time that
athletes from North and South Korea have marched together under one flag. They
did so in 2000 at the Sydney Olympics in Australia, in 2004 in Athens, and in
2006 in Torino, Italy.
But by doing so in South Korea — and in
Gangwon Province, where North Korea is visible from the peaks of the ski slopes
— the symbolism this time was particularly striking. It also provided a stark
contrast to the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, where the North Koreans did
not compete after organizing a terrorist attack in which spies blew up a South
Korean airliner 10 months before the Games, killing everyone on board.
The Seoul Olympics ended up being a turning
point for South Korea as it pulled away from North Korea economically,
politically and culturally.
It was also, as it turned out, a turning
point for the world. After two previous summer games roiled by political
boycotts in Moscow and Los Angeles, the countries that had sat out those games
all sent athletes to Seoul, making it the host of the largest number of
participating nations during the Cold War era.
A year later, the Berlin Wall fell. The
Soviet Union collapsed not long after that.
“In a sense, the Cold War symbolically ended
with the Seoul Olympics,” said Lee O. Young, creative director of the 1988
opening ceremony, in an interview in his library in Seoul this week.
Mr. Lee, whose slogan for those ceremonies
was “beyond the wall,” said that he believed in the power of imagination to
drive change.
“The Pyeongchang Olympics, in very surprising
ways, could be another turning point in the way the Seoul Olympics was,” said
Mr. Lee. “After the Seoul Olympics, we have been experiencing a new Cold War,
and the Pyeongchang Olympics might set another milestone.”
Su-hyun Lee contributed reporting from Seoul.