North and South Korean teams to march as one at Olympics

HONG KONG — North and South Korea agreed on Wednesday (Jan 17) to field a joint women's ice hockey team at the Winter Olympics next month, and to have their athletes march together at the opening ceremony under one flag.

The agreement is a milestone in inter-Korean sports relations, and Seoul has said in the past that it hoped such a move could contribute to a political thaw after years of high tensions over the North's nuclear and missile tests.

The Games, which begin on Feb 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, will be the first time the two Koreas have agreed to a joint Olympic team. It will also be the first joint team since athletes from both Koreas played together for an international table-tennis championship and a youth football match in 1991.

The two countries' delegations will march at the opening ceremony behind a "unified Korea" flag that shows an undivided Korean Peninsula, negotiators from both sides said in a joint news release after talks at the border village of Panmunjom.

The prospect of inter-Korean reconciliation, through sports and other channels, has strong appeal in South Korea, so much so that successive governments have tried to negotiate sending a unified team to the Olympics.

Such efforts have sometimes led to breakthroughs. In 2000, the year of the first inter-Korean summit meeting, the countries' delegations marched together at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. They did so again in Athens in 2004, carrying a blue-and-white flag representing a united Korea. The two Koreas last marched together in the Asian Winter Games in 2007.

But forming a joint Olympic team proved elusive. Past negotiations had faltered over such details as whether a joint team would have an equal number of players from each country, who would choose the coaches and where the athletes would train.

South Korean athletes, who have far more resources and Olympic experience than their counterparts from the North, have baulked in the past at the idea of sacrificing their hard-earned prospects for the sake of parity with North Korea in a united team. The South Korean news media has reported that the South asked the International Olympic Committee to allow a unified hockey team to have an expanded roster, so that none of the South Korean players would have to bow out of the Games. THE NEW YORK TIMES