OLYMPICS Table tennis champions from both Koreas together for a selfie

The Paris Olympics had begun with a name-dropping mistake during the opening ceremony that had angered South Korean officials. Instead, the table tennis mixed doubles players gathered for a group photo on the podium. Taken with a Samsung mobile phone.

Paris (/Agencies) – North and South Korea may be formally at war, but a selfie taken yesterday at the Olympic Games brought peace to the peninsula for a moment.

After finishing second and third in the mixed doubles table tennis event behind China, the two athletes from the Korean peninsula posed for the camera of South Korean player Lim Jong-hoon (partnered with Shin Yu-bin), who wanted to immortalize the podium with a group photo immediately after the award ceremony. He used a mobile phone from Samsung, a well-known South Korean giant, to do so.

“I congratulated them when they were introduced as silver medal winners,” Lim told the media, referring to the North Korean athletes. The selfie was widely broadcast on South Korean television. One commentator noted: “This is the true spirit of the Olympic Games.”

However, during the opening ceremony of the Games, South Korea was introduced as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”, the full name of North Korea. It was then repeated (this time correctly) as the Pyongyang delegation passed by. The South Korean Ministry of Sports, addressing the French organisers and the International Olympic Committee, expressed its “regret at the announcement” and requested a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach. No one could have imagined that a few days later athletes from both countries would share the podium without any problems.

In 2018, at the PyeongChang Winter Games, the two delegations had marched (and in one case even played) together. But then, due to the pandemic, North Korea decided not to send athletes to Tokyo 2020, also missing the winter edition of Beijing two years ago. Yesterday’s podium in table tennis is therefore the first for North Korea since the Rio 2016 Games.

During the press conference after the award ceremony, the two Chinese gold medalists congratulated the North Korean players, describing them as “formidable opponents.” While the North Korean male (Ri Jong Sik) and female (Kim Kum Yong) players stressed that they had “learned from the Chinese team, which is always number one. We will do better next time to win gold,” they said. However, they did not confirm whether they had also trained in China before the Olympics, a rumour circulating “on the internet,” according to some journalists.

Near the end of the conference, Kim was asked if the North Korean team had felt any “rivalry” towards their South Korean opponents, who had battled another pair of Asian players, the representatives of Hong Kong, for third place. Kim took the lead: “No, we haven’t felt it,” he replied.