Top Olympics official ‘deeply sorry’ for introducing South Korea as North Korea during opening ceremony
The mishap occurred on Friday, when the South Korean athletes made their debut on a boat cruising down the River Seine. Both the French and English announcements falsely identified them as being from the “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.”
That’s the full name of North Korea. The official name of South Korea is the “Republic of Korea.”
The error is politically sensitive for the two Koreas, which are still technically at war. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, and no peace treaty has ever been signed.
On Sunday, Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), spoke with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on a call, according to a statement.
“In this telephone call, the IOC President apologized sincerely for the mistake in the audio broadcast of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 ... in which the team of the National Olympic Committee of the Republic of Korea ... was wrongly identified,” it said.
“The problem was identified as a human error, for which the IOC is deeply sorry,” it added.
The phone call followed a more immediate apology from the Olympics body, which was issued shortly after the blunder on its official Korean-language account on X.
At a press conference on Saturday, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams called the incident “clearly deeply regrettable” and that the body “apologize[d] wholeheartedly,” Reuters reported.
South Korea’s Sports Ministry has said it “expresses regret” over the introduction of the South Korean delegation during the opening broadcast.
The 143 South Korean athletes are competing in 21 events. North Korea has sent 16 athletes to Paris after it dropped out of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which took place in 2021, over Covid-19 concerns. The country was subsequently banned from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing for unilaterally skipping the games in Japan.
In recent weeks, tensions in the Korean Peninsula have flared up over thousands of garbage-laden balloons Pyongyang sent to South Korea, some of which have reached the grounds of the presidential compound in Seoul.
Pyongyang has previously said it sent balloons south in response to a civilian campaign in South Korea to float balloons carrying anti-North Korean propaganda in the opposite direction.
Olympics organizers have “deeply apologized” to South Korea over a “human error” that saw its 143 athletes being wrongly introduced as North Korean at the opening ceremony.
Despite the apologies from the International Olympic Committee and Olympics organizers, the misidentification of South Korean athletes as North Korean during the opening ceremony has caused significant controversy in Asia and beyond. This incident highlights the political sensitivity between North and South Korea, two nations that remain technically at war and have complex geopolitical relationships with various regions around the world.
