Inter-Korean relations may be at their worst point in years, but that did not stop athletes from North and South Korea from congratulating each other on their medal wins, and smiling for a selfie, at the Paris Olympic Games.
In an unexpectedly strong performance, North Korea on Tuesday won silver in mixed doubles ping pong, marking the country’s first Olympic medal since 2016. South Korea took the bronze in the competition, while China won gold.
After the medal ceremony, South Korean athlete Lim Jong-hoon whipped out a South Korea-made Samsung flip-phone to take a selfie, as all six medalists gathered close behind.
The North and South Korean athletes also shook hands and briefly exchanged congratulations during the ceremony, though according to Lim the two sides did not have any further conversation.
Asked at a news conference whether the North Korean team felt any sense of rivalry with their South Korean counterparts, one of the North Korean athletes, Kim Kum-yong, said, “No, we did not.”
Though brief, it was a rare moment of public interaction between the two Koreas, whose citizens have almost no means of direct contact due to North Korea’s stringent restrictions on communicating with the outside world.
In South Korea, some commentators hailed the encounter as a welcome moment of harmony, even as both governments are entrenched in escalating tensions that many fear could soon intensify.
Since May, North Korea has sent thousands of balloons filled with trash and other items, including feces, into South Korea, disrupting flights and prompting massive clean-up efforts by South Korea’s military.
North Korea says the trash balloons are a response to South Korean human rights activists who float anti-Pyongyang leaflets and other propaganda into the North. Such material is viewed as an existential threat to North Korea’s hereditary dictatorship.
In retaliation for the trash balloon launches, South Korea’s military has resumed loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts across the border.
The propaganda exchanges have raised fears of potential clashes, since North Korea has in the past fired weapons toward South Korean loudspeakers.
The two Koreas are in a technical state of war since their 1950s conflict ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty. The two sides have periodically engaged in cross-border clashes, though such hostilities have been rare in recent decades.
In the past, the Olympics have served as a way to foster warmer inter-Korean ties. The two Koreas marched together as a joint team during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
The 2018 Olympics coincided with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s short-lived outreach to the United States and South Korea. However, since late 2019, Kim has rejected any dialogue with Washington and Seoul.
Earlier this year, the nuclear-armed North declared South Korea to be its “principal enemy,” vowing to annihilate it if provoked.
