Winter Olympics 2018: The Olympics of Ice and Snow in Korea

By Thanh Khuu

This logo for the 2018 Winter Olympics represented the Olympics in PyeongChang, where people from all over the world come watch athletes, the place “where heaven meets earth.”

The Winter Olympics in South Korea was the second time South Korea has hosted the Olympics. Though South Korea hasn’t hosted the Winter Olympics before, it has hosted the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul. It did have problems with North Korea, although in the 2018 Winter Games, their relationship looks like it has improved, and North Korea will participate in the Olympic Games for the first time in eight years. Back then, drama had threaten the Olympics thirty years ago. When both North Korea and South Korea participates in the game, they are called Republic of Korea, because they are trying to keep the tensions from boiling into nuclear war, and are both going to enter the 2018 Winter Olympics under a unified flag. The Republic of Korea had won five gold medals, eight silver medals, and four bronze medals. Add them all up, it’s seventeen medals, and they placed 7th in the amount of medals won in the olympics.

Thirty years ago, Seoul in South Korea won the bid to host the 1988 Summer Games. North Korea campaigned in an attempt to co-host the Summer Games, but failed. This dispute had proven tragic and rage-inducing to people today a few years later. On November 29, 1987, Korean Air Flight 858 from Baghdad to Seoul disappeared off the Burmese Coast, along with the 115 passengers in it. The remains of the flight would be discover later, in the Andaman Sea, In an TV

interview, Kim Hyon Hui, who was 26 years old,  admitted to being a North Korean agent and described how she had put a bomb disguised as a radio on the jetliner, and set its timer to go off when she and her partner in crime, Kim Sung II, who was 69 years old, got off the plane. When they were arrested, they both swallowed capsules containing cyanide, in an attempt to commit suicide. Sung died, but Hui survived. She was interviewed in a 2013 BBC interview and she said that this mission would cause chaos and confusion in South Korea. The South Korean government charged the North Korea government for blowing up the plane. They denied the whole thing, and tried unsuccessfully to recruit allies to boycott the Games. Instead, they tried to outsmart South Korea and made their own Olympics, calling it the 1989 World Festival of Students and Youth. The project costed four billion dollars, and the stadium, the May Day stadium, could hold 150,000 people, twice the amount of the people the stadium Seoul built for the Summer Games. The stadium is now used to host the annual Mass Games.

The Republic of Korea won seventeen medals, five gold medals, eight silver medals, and four bronze medals. They were 7th in the amount of medals won by a country. Six of those medals were won in Short Track Speed Skating, seven of them won in Speed Skating, and the others won in bobsleigh, curling, skeleton, and snowboard. The medalists were Lim Hyojun, Choi Minjeong, Hwang Daeheon, Seo Yira, Yun Sungbin, Lee Hyojun, Lee Sango, Lee Seunghoon, Cha Min Kyu, Lee Sanghwa, Kim Bo-Reum, Kim Tae-Yun, and Kim Min Seok. There would be too many names to list here to show who participated in the Winter Games from the Republic of Korea, but 45 females and 78 males participated, totaling to 123 participants from Korea.

    South Korea and North Korea have decided to march together under a unified flag. They decided to march together after talks between the two countries, and they did a good job keeping down military tensions, but some of Seoul’s allies are concerned that Pyongyang used the time from the talks to build on their weapons programs. From a CNN article, a section states: “The US military has moved more firepower to the region and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned of complacency at a Tuesday summit in Vancouver where the top diplomats from the United States, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom were in town to discuss North Korea.” Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said at the meeting: “I believe that North Korea wants to buy some time to continue their nuclear and missiles program. It’s not the time to ease pressure towards North Korea.” Some people doubt that North Korea just talked about the unification at the Games, but they had used the time to work on their nuclear and missile program. Some people wonder if how much will progress after the Games, or if the tensions between the two Koreas would worsen.

In the end, the 2018 Winter Pyeongchang Olympics was a major event in the occurrence of the world. It helped 307 athletes to achieve their dream about getting a medal in the Olympics. It also helped to advance the goal of pacifying relations after the Korean War. Something also accomplished was the peaceful unification of the North and South Korean athletes, as well as marking the first time that North Korean athletes participated in an Olympic event. Overall, the Pyeongchang Olympics was a large accomplishment and event in the historical standpoint.

Bibliography

Griffiths, James. “North and South Korea to March Together at Olympics.” CNN, Cable News Network, 18 Jan. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/01/17/asia/north-south-korea-olympics-flag-intl/index.html