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PARIS — Olympic Games organizers said they “deeply apologize” for
introducing South Korea’s athletes as North Korea during the opening
ceremony in Paris.

As the South Korean athletes waved their nation’s flag on a boat floating
down the Seine River 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 apologize 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.

Jang Mi Ran, the second vice minister of South Korea’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Ministry, requested a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach over
the incident, the ministry said in a statement Saturday. It said the
ministry also asked South Korea’s Foreign Ministry to file “a strong government-level complaint” with the French government.

The statement said South Korea’s Olympic committee separately asked the organizers of the Paris Games to prevent the recurrence of similar
incidents.

Bach called South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday and
apologized over the incident, Yoon’s office said in a statement.

Yoon told Bach that the South Korean people were “very shocked and
embarrassed” over the incident and asked him to offer an apology via media
and social media and prevent the recurrence of similar mistakes. Bach told
Yoon that he would take all available steps not to repeat it, according to Yoon’s office.

IOC spokesperson Mark Adams called the error “clearly deeply regrettable.”

“An operational mistake was made. We can only apologize, in an evening of
so many moving parts, that this mistake was made,” Adams said in response
to a question from a South Korean journalist during a news conference.

The Korean peninsula has been bitterly divided into South Korea and North
Korea since the end of World War II in 1945.

The blue sign on the boat carrying the South Korean athletes did show the correct name.

The mix-up echoed another during the 2012 Olympics in London, where
organizers posted the South Korean flag on a jumbo screen as a North
Korean player was introduced before a women’s soccer match, leading the
North Koreans to refuse to take the field for nearly an hour.

In another opening ceremony glitch Friday, the Olympic flag featuring the
five rings was upside down when it was hoisted toward the end of the
ceremony.

“It’s regrettable,” Adams said. “In a four-hour show occasionally things happen. We can all move on from that one, it’s not the end (of the
world).”

After the flag was raised, the broadcast by the IOC’s own television
operations did not show any close-up images of it. Typically, flagpoles at Olympic ceremonies have a mechanism that blows a breeze across the flag to stretch it out. On Friday, the Olympic rings flag hung limply down next to
the pole.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/olympics-apologize-colossal-mistake-opening- 152248043.html

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