North Korea Makes Peace with the Olympics

But few athletes may have a more impactful presence next month at the games, which are being promoted as a chance to ease political and nuclear tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula after North Korea announced Tuesday that it would participate in the games.

The pairs team, which finished 15th at the world skating championships last year, is expected to represent the height of sporting aspirations for North Korea. Details are still being worked out about which athletes will compete, but Ryom, who will turn 19 just days before the Olympics begin, and Kim, who is 25, are the only North Koreans who have qualified for the 2018 Games.

They are the lone elite, world-class winter athletes from the isolated nation, which has only won two medals at the Winter Games, a silver and bronze in speedskating, the last coming in 1992, and they have plenty of admirers among figure skating’s cognoscenti.

“They are so charismatic; I know the crowd would fall for them with their smile and passion and love of skating,” Bruno Marcotte, a prominent Canadian pairs coach who worked with the skaters last summer in Montreal and during an Olympic qualifying competition in Germany in September, said Tuesday. “I feel they’ll be a crowd favorite.”

Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, has made North Korea’s participation a priority during the past year, and he said in a statement Tuesday that North Korea’s decision to take part in the 2018 Winter Games was “a great step forward in the Olympic spirit.”

The Olympic ideal has long been tarnished by scandal and prohibitive costs that make the games unaffordable to many cities. But the IOC, since its founding in the 19th century, has prided itself on the Olympics serving as essentially a peace movement. They are meant to show that the world’s nations and athletes can come together and, if only for a brief period, the chance of conflict can be lessened.

For those who still subscribe to that ideal, hopes soared Tuesday. “This is going to put a positive vibe into those games,” Marcotte said.

There is, too, a widely-expressed hope among South Korean officials and international sports officials and athletes that North Korea’s unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Un, will be less likely to behave provocatively during the Olympics if his country’s athletes are participating.

Last week, the North Korean ruler boasted that the United States was within range of a nuclear arsenal he could operate with a button on his desk. President Donald Trump responded on Twitter by bragging about the nuclear capabilities of the United States and the size of his button.

The jousting evoked somber Olympic memories from three decades ago. Ten months before the 1988 Summer Games were held in Seoul, the South Korean capital, North Korean agents placed a bomb aboard a Korean Air flight and killed all 115 aboard in what South Korean officials said was an attempt to undermine those Olympics. North Korea boycotted those games.

At the last major international sporting event held in South Korea, soccer’s 2002 World Cup, North Korea provoked a naval skirmish with the South on the day that South Korea played a match for third place.

But, on various fields of play, the two countries have been on convivial terms lately. Last year, North Korea sent its women’s national hockey team to play in South Korea, and South Korea sent its women’s soccer team to play in North Korea. North Korea also sent a taekwondo team to the South.

The two nations marched together in the opening ceremony at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics. South Korean officials have held open that possibility for the Winter Games.

South Korean officials have also strenuously sought to play down security concerns before the 2018 Games, which will be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, only about 40 miles from the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South.

“These worries are understandable,” Choi Moon-soon, governor of the South Korean province where the Olympics will take place, told reporters last year. But, referring to North Korea, he added, “If they participate in the event, that threat disappears.”

It is not known whether Kim Jong Un had any plans to disrupt the Pyeongchang Games, but Olympic insiders have said the presence of North Korean athletes would allow them to rest more easily.

Last week, at the U.S. figure skating championships, David Raith, executive director of U.S. Figure Skating, said he welcomed North Korea’s presence at the Olympics.

“We’re hoping they’re there,” Raith said. “It would be the safest place in the world.”

North Korea missed a deadline in late October to officially enter its pairs team into the Olympics. And it does not yet appear to have made such a request, Alexander Lakernik, a Russian who is vice president of the International Skating Union, said Tuesday.

But adding the North Koreans to the Olympic pairs competition would be a simple procedure. And the IOC has said it would keep the doors open to North Korea’s participation for as long as possible. The Olympic committee has also broached the idea of offering North Korea wild-card entries in some Nordic skiing sports and short-track speedskating.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Discussions have been underway about the pairs team, Lakernik said, and given the special circumstances, “there could be an exception made; but first we need an application.”

While North Korea has won 16 gold medals in the Summer Games, in such sports as weight lifting, wrestling and boxing, it is not a power in the more expensive winter sports. North Korea did not participate in the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. Its officials have recently complained that tightened sanctions against the country have made it difficult to obtain some sports equipment.

In general, North Korea has not appeared to follow the model of the former Soviet Union and East Germany, which were both winter sports powers and used gold medals for propaganda purposes. But experts see participation in these games as an attempt by Kim to get sanctions eased and to reduce the chances of U.S. military action.

“Sports diplomacy is a sexy affair,” said Lee Sung-yoon, a Korea expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “Pyongyang has all the reason to jazz up the Winter Olympiad and be the center of attention.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Purely in skating terms, Marcotte, the coach said, the North Koreans appear to be mirroring the Chinese model of attempting to build pairs teams to an elite international level.

At the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics, Chinese pairs won two of the three available medals and are among the favorites to win gold at the 2018 Games. Ryom and Kim possess some of the dynamism seen in Chinese pairs and also some of the classic, balletic style of Russian skaters. There is Western influence in their routines as well. They perform their short program to an instrumental version of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”

While qualifying for the 2018 Games at a competition in Germany in September, the skaters spoke several times with reporters and seemed relatively open. Both Ryom and Kim are listed as students. Both live in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, where loyalists to the Kim Jong Un regime are permitted to reside.

“I want to continue to improve until I become world champion,” Ryom said at the time.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

One subject was off-limits: the Olympics, because no decision had yet been made about North Korea’s participation.

And there seemed to be every attempt to avoid politics.

Neither skater, for instance, wore pins commonly worn by North Koreans that depict Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather and father, who preceded him as the country’s dynastic rulers. And both skaters neglected to praise Kim Jong Un for their success, another common practice for North Korean athletes.

Marcotte said that all his interactions with the skaters had been about “sports, sports, sports.”

And while their performance at the Olympics would carry broader meaning for many, he said, the skaters would most likely feel only the pressure that every skater feels — to perform at their best.

“They want to show the world that they’re a good team,” Marcotte said.

The New York Times