Olympic Games organisers said they “deeply apologise” for introducing South Korea’s athletes as North Korean during the opening ceremony in Paris.
As the South Korean athletes waved their nation’s flag on a boat floating down the Seine on Friday evening, they were announced in both French and English as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. South Korea is the Republic of Korea.
“We deeply apologise for the mistake that occurred when introducing the Korean team during the opening ceremony broadcast,” the International Olympic Committee said in a post on X in Korean.
The IOC president, Thomas Bach, will also meet with South Korea’s leader, Yoon Suk-yeol, over the incident. The South Korean ministry of culture sports and tourism said it would file “a strong government-level complaint” with the French government.
The ministry’s statement said South Korea’s Olympic committee separately asked the organizers of the Paris Games to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents.
The IOC spokesperson Mark Adams on Saturday called the error “clearly deeply regrettable”. He added that “an operational mistake was made. We can only apologise, in an evening of so many moving parts, that this mistake was made”
A similar incident occurred at the 2012 Olympics in London. Organisers there apologised and blamed human error when South Korea’s flag appeared alongside North Korea’s women’s football team on stadium screens in Glasgow as players warmed up before their opening match.
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South Korea and North Korea, established as separate entities in 1948, have a tense relationship. The Korean war, which tore the peninsula apart, killed millions of people, mostly civilians.
Source: theguardian.com
