PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (AP) — The overtly political 2018 Winter Olympics closed Sunday night very much as they began, with humanity’s finest athletes marching exuberantly across the world stage as three nations with decades of war and suspicion among them shared a VIP box — and a potential path away from conflict.
Senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. presidential adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump sat in two rows of seats behind the Olympic rings, meant to represent a competition of peace and international unity. In close proximity — though with no apparent communication between Trump and Kim — they watched a spirited, elaborate show that concluded the Pyeongchang Games.
Even as dancers performed cultural stories to music before an enormous crowd, South Korea’s presidential office released a brief statement saying that Pyongyang had expressed willingness to hold talks with Washington.
The North has “ample intentions of holding talks with the United States,” according to the office. The North’s delegation also agreed that “South-North relations and U.S.-North Korean relations should be improved together,” Moon’s office, known as the Blue House, said.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, just before declaring the games closed, addressed the two Koreas’ cooperation at the closing ceremony, saying, “The Olympic games are an homage to the past and an act of faith for the future.”
“With your joint march you have shared your faith in a peaceful future with all of us,” Bach said. “You have shown our sport brings people together in our very fragile world. You have shown how sport builds bridges.”
It was all an extraordinary bookend to an extraordinary Olympics that featured athletic excellence, sideline surprises and unexpected lurches forward toward a new detente on the Korean Peninsula. Thrilled athletes marched into the arena around the world’s flags, relaxed after showing their athletic best to themselves and to the world.
“We have been through a lot so that we could blaze a trail,” said Kim Eun-jung, skip of the South Korean women’s curling team, which captured global renown as the “Garlic Girls” — all from a garlic-producing Korean hometown. They made a good run for gold before finishing with runner-up silver.
That these games would be circumscribed by politics was a given from the outset because of regional rivalries. North Korea, South Korea, Japan and China are neighbors with deep, sometimes twisted histories that get along uneasily with each other in this particular geographic cul-de-sac.
But there was something more this time around. Hanging over the entire games was the saga — or opportunity, if you prefer — of a delicate diplomatic dance between the Koreas, North and South, riven by bloodshed and discord and an armed border for the better part of a century.
The games started with a last-minute flurry of agreements to bring North Koreans to South Korea to compete under one combined Koreas banner. Perish the thought, some said, but Moon’s government stayed the course. By the opening ceremony, a march of North and South into the Olympic Stadium was watched by the world — and by dozens of North Korean cheerleaders applauding in calibrated synchronicity.
Also watching was an equally extraordinary, if motley, crew. Deployed in a VIP box together were Moon, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s envoy sister, Kim Yo Jong. The latter two, at loggerheads over North Korea’s nuclear program, didn’t speak, and the world watched the awkwardness.
What followed was a strong dose of athletic diplomacy: two weeks of global exposure for the Korean team, particularly the women’s hockey squad, which trained for weeks with North and South side by side getting along, taking selfies and learning about each other.
On Sunday night, though K-pop megastars EXO claimed center stage, leaders rejoined athletes as a primary focus.
Kim, President Donald Trump’s daughter and Moon sat in close proximity as the Olympics’ end unfolded before them and the statement was released in Seoul. Also seated nearby was Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. forces Korea. Unlike Pence, Ivanka Trump was smiling as she turned in the North Koreans’ direction. It was not clear what she was smiling at, but a White House official said it was not the North Koreans.
The developments Sunday both inside and outside the VIP box were particularly striking given that Kim Yong Chol, now vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party Central Committee, is suspected of masterminding a lethal 2010 military attack on the South.
Outside the stadium, North Korea was not welcomed as much.
More than 200 anti-Pyongyang protesters, waving South Korean and U.S. flags, banging drums and holding signs like “Killer Kim Yong Chol go to hell,” rallied in streets near the park. They denounced the South Korean government’s decision to allow the visit. There were no major clashes.
That wasn’t all when it came to these odd games. Let’s not forget Russia — or, we should say, “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” the shame-laced moniker they inherited after a doping brouhaha from the 2014 Sochi Games doomed them to a non-flag-carrying Pyeongchang Games.
Two more Russian athletes tested positive in Pyeongchang in the past two weeks. So on Sunday morning, the IOC refused to reinstate the team in time for the closing but left the door open for near-term redemption from what one exasperated committee member called “this entire Russia drama.”
Away from the politics, humanity’s most extraordinary feats of winter athletic prowess unfolded, revealing the expected triumphs but also stars most unlikely — from favorites like Mikaela Shiffrin, Shaun White and Lindsey Vonn to sudden surprise legends like Czech skier-snowboarder Ester Ledecka and the medal-grabbing “Garlic Girls.”
Other Olympic trailblazers: Chloe Kim, American snowboarder extraordinaire. The U.S. women’s hockey team and men’s curlers, both of which claimed gold. And the Russian men’s hockey team, with its nail-biting, overtime victory against Germany.
What’s next for the games? Tokyo in Summer 2020, then Beijing — Summer host in 2008 — staging an encore, this time for a Winter Games. With the completion of the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, that Olympic trinity marks one-third of a noteworthy Olympic run by Asia.
For those keeping score at home: That means four of eight Olympic Games between 2008 and 2022 will have taken place on the Asian continent. Not bad for a region that hosted only four games in the 112 years of modern Olympic history before that — Tokyo in 1964, Sapporo in 1972, Seoul in 1988 and Nagano in 1998. Japan and China will, it’s likely, be highly motivated to outdo South Korea (and each other).
As signs came down, shipping boxes were loaded and the area emptied out early Monday, the departing Olympians left behind a Korean Peninsula full of possibility for peace, or at least less hostility.
The steps taken by North and South toward each other this month are formidable but fluid. People are cautiously optimistic: The governor of Gangwon, the border province where Pyeongchang is located, even suggested Sunday that the 2021 Asian Games could be co-hosted by both Koreas.
It probably won’t happen. But it could. That could be said about pretty much anything at an Olympic Games, inside the rings and out. Corporate and political and regimented though it may be, that’s what makes it still the best game in town for an athletic thrill every other year — and yes, sometimes a political one, too.
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Ted Anthony has been the director of Asia-Pacific news for The Associated Press since 2014. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @anthonyted.
Ivanka Trump was smiling as she turned in the North Koreans’ direction. It was not clear what she was smiling at, but a White House official said it was not the North Koreans.
Oh hell, we almost had them until she smiled.
Why oh Why is she even there? oh daddy’s favorite kid.
She knows a huge new source of slave labor when she sees one.
Where’s Wonder-Boy? Home minding the kiddies (and filling out the forty-eleventh version of his clearance docs)?
From our earliest memories, we are captured by the athletic spirit and fascinated by the spectacle of sport. For nothing so epitomizes our reach for excellence, delight in our physical abilities, and our highest expression of “higher, faster stronger.”
We are told sports is a crucial element of our development, and not just for the need to attain physical fitness and exercise our muscles with formative stress: through sports we learn to socialize with others, escape temporarily our daily existence and enjoy playing a game in the same way that we find temporary escape and transcendence from mundane reality in the rituals and ceremony of religion, become introduced into the complex relations that bind us with those around us, and gain the confidence in our own abilities and our abilities to compete and interact with others.
In our society, there are few more reviled targets for our moral disapproval that those who were accused of cheating, bad sportsmanship, cowardice, or selling out or betraying a common cause.
Sports also promotes the values of fair play, endurance in the struggle for survival, effort, discipline, restraint, adventure, team spirit, and submission to rules and codes of good conduct – it’s perhaps the most deeply rooted impulse of our life and spirit.
This status can be seen in the world of higher education: the academic accomplishments of our major universities are rarely discussed outside close circles, but the athletic achievements of a university make headlines, attract contributions from alumni and boosters, and trumpet glory in the media.
Ancient Greece, birthplace of western civilization and democracy, reveled in the capabilities of humankind. In contrast to earlier, static depictions of man, Greek artists portrayed the human form in motion – part of a celebration of the dynamic, active, creative principle guiding all people. To compete in the Olympic Games was a fulfillment of the highest ideals of speed, strength and endurance in celebration of a shared race and culture.
The conception of the common man as an agent of his or her own self-fulfillment and destiny has been a rallying cry for all free people, and excellence in the arena was no less prized than heroism in the battlefield.
At times the two became as one. Indeed, legend has it that the name of our longest-distance endurance race descends from the tireless and ultimately tragic exploit of that heroic military messenger who, after making the 26-mile run non-stop from Marathon to Athens to exclaim “We have won!” to the Greek assembly, promptly collapsed and died.
And during periods when the ancient Olympics were held at the sacred competition site in Olympia in Greece, wars were put on hold in order for the best athletes – who were very often also the top soldiers – to gather and compete. Those competitors were also held up as symbols of their respective city-states, and their performances became a way for each athlete’s city-state to promote and proclaim its greatness.
While the games commenced, diplomats and other dignitaries from the various Greek city-states would often take advantage of the neutral Games site in order to initiate informal negotiations that often resulted in suspended wars never resuming after the games were finished.
So there’s always been an aspect of politics and statecraft to the Olympic Games.
The Greeks also had the legend of the Minotaur, another cultural reminder, one that warned all of the monstrous consequences of the subversion of shared ideals in pursuit of private interests and personal gain.
Today, as our relations with each other, with other societies and the larger world around us grow ever complex, sports has taken on a new meaning.
Today, sports has become a big business, mass entertainment, a fixture of our popular culture and, judging by the audience for Sunday football, almost a national religion. It has become an end to itself, rather than a means to enjoy a fuller life. And success in sports can lead to success in life, with all the fame and fortune that entails. But it cannot be the ultimate meaning of life; it is, after all, only a game, and for the athlete life must go on long after the cheering of the crowds stop.
And therein lies the paradox and the challenge: to embody the spirit and lesson of athletics, to give one’s all to that climactic and cathartic moment, both fleeting and eternal, of overcoming the most daunting and stubborn challenge of self-imposed limits, while constrained by the spirit of fair play.
Hemingway, who was drawn to heroes and the sport of bullfighting, prized this ideal and called it grace under pressure.
Just as we do not live to eat but eat to live, just as we cannot live to philosophize but must philosophize in order to live a better life, we must realize that even as we are compelled to play to win, we must not lose sight of the game, which is quite different from the prize.
Whether it’s the thrill of a 60-yard kickoff return, a deftly executed triple axel jump, a soaring pole vault or a Little Leaguer valiantly sliding into third base, excellence in sports inspires a timeless and universal sense of wonder of accomplishment, evokes poetry in motion, and rejoices in one daring, climactic push to the limits of human performance.
But as we search for meaning and purpose in our lives, as we strive to create a world that embodies our highest ideals and promotes the fellowship of all peoples, how do we prepare our athletes of today and tomorrow for the day when the cheering of the crowd stops?