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IOC President Thomas Bach holds a press conference in at the IOC headquarters in Lausanne

The International Olympic Committee’s declaration on Jan. 20 that it will allow a unified Korean women’s hockey team to compete in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics for the first time in history and to give credentials to 46 North Koreans (22 athletes and 24 officials and team staff) shows that using sports to ease inter-Korean tensions coincides with the spirit of the Olympics.

“The Olympic Games are always about building bridges. They never erect walls. The Olympic spirit is about respect, dialogue and understanding. The Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games 2018 are hopefully opening the door to a brighter future on the Korean peninsula,” said IOC President Thomas Bach after a four-party meeting between the IOC, South and North Korea’s Olympic committees and the Pyeongchang Olympics’ organizing committee.

The IOC’s decision enables the North to send its largest ever team of athletes to the Winter Olympics. In addition to requalifying figure skating duo Ryom Tae-ok and Kim Ju-sik, who were disqualified after they missed the deadline for confirming their participation, an invitation has been extended to three cross-country skiers, three alpine skiers, two short track skaters and 12 women’s hockey players who had not qualified to begin with. While the IOC has the authority to extent special invitations to athletes from countries with less developed sports programs, this was an unusually generous decision.

The IOC’s decision to open the way for North Korea’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics has two objectives: achieving peace and putting on a good show. Simply letting the North take part in the games sends a powerful message for peace to the participating countries. International Ice Hockey Federation President René Fasel said that the benefits of increasing the roster for the unified inter-Korean team to 35 outweighed concerns about fairness.

Admittedly, the debate over the unified women’s hockey team, which played out during a brief period of 20 days after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed his willingness to participate in the Olympics during his New Year’s address, has not been without controversy. The government has focused on the long-term values of striving for unification and expanding inter-Korean exchange through the Olympics, while the other side has argued that the state should not rob athletes who have trained hard for four years of their chance to compete in the Olympics.

North Korea’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics and the creation of a unified inter-Korean women’s hockey team are likely to create an opportunity for redefining Pyeongchang’s legacy. They seem poised to dispel the dark cloud that has been hanging over the games because of growing public displeasure with large-scale sporting events, a reputation tarnished by the Choi Sun-sil scandal and other meddling by vested interests, in addition to the ban on Russia for state-sponsored doping. “The Pyeongchang Olympics will be remembered as the ‘Peace Olympics,’” said one senior South Korean government official.

By Kim Chang-keum, staff reporter

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