Pyongyang returns to the Olympics, but in a different climate than in 2018

The non-participation in the Tokyo 2020 Games led to the exclusion of the Beijing 2022 winter event as well. In PyeongChang, athletes from North and South Korea paraded and played together to the point that there was speculation that a peace treaty would be signed. Today, relations with Seoul are once again hostile.

Paris (AsiaNews) - North Korea will also be at the Paris Olympics, which kicks off today after years of absence due to the Covid-19 pandemic and a consequent suspension by the International Olympic Committee (which obliges all national Olympic committees to take part in the Games) which remained in force until the end of 2022, thus excluding athletes of the North Korean regime also from participating in the Beijing Winter Olympics.

This year, Pyongyang has sent 12 female and four male athletes who will compete in eight disciplines (artistic gymnastics, athletics, boxing, swimming, diving, judo, table tennis, wrestling), and will be accompanied by the Minister of Sports, Kim Il Guk.

The 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang seem like a distant memory: on that occasion, the athletes of the two Koreas not only paraded together: the ice hockey players competed as a single team, despite not knowing each other and having never played together before that moment.

The participation of North Korea itself was confirmed only at the last moment. Even the choice of location, in the north of South Korea near the demarcation line that divides the peninsula in two, had taken on a strong symbolic meaning. In general, the event had fueled a certain hope for the achievement of peace between the two countries, technically still at war for never having signed a treaty but only an armistice at the end of the conflict in 1953. On that occasion, the sister of the dictator Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, went to South Korea to attend the event. The two countries had also attempted a joint bid for the 2032 Games.

A very different climate from that of 1988, when the North boycotted the Olympics held in Seoul, but also a very different atmosphere from the one we breathe today, in which calls for a suspension of international conflicts during the competition period have gone unheard.

According to Korean business analysts, once the dialogue window that had opened in 2018-19 closed, Pyongyang returned to its international isolation. Participation in Paris 2024 could signal a timid opening to the outside world. Or, as others argue, an opportunity for Russia and North Korea to increase cyber attacks in an attempt to raise funds for the regime.

The presence of a North Korean delegation had also caused controversy at the Asian Games between September and October last year when Wada, the world anti-doping agency, asked the Asian Olympic Committee to pay 500,000 dollars for allowing North Korea to use its flag. The ban was imposed because, by closing its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic, Pyongyang had prevented all anti-doping monitoring procedures (a situation that still generates some discontent among athletes from other foreign nations).

But unlike Russia, whose athletes have been competing under the flag of the national Olympic association for years, North Korea attaches enormous importance to the flag, which according to the national narrative was designed by Kim Jong Un's grandfather, Kim Il Sung. "It is therefore a symbol directly linked to the founder of the country and to the entire mythology of the state," explained Fyodor Tertiskiy, a researcher at Kookmin University in Seoul.