PARIS — Olympic organizers say they “deeply apologize” for portraying South Korean athletes as North Koreans during the opening ceremony in Paris.
On Friday evening, as South Korean athletes waved their country’s flag on a boat sailing down the River Seine, it was announced in French and English that their name was 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, second vice minister of South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, has requested a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach over the incident, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday. She also asked South Korea’s Foreign Ministry to lodge “a firm complaint at the government level” with the French government.
The statement said South Korea’s Olympic committee had separately asked Paris Games organisers to avoid a repeat of similar incidents.
Bach called South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday and apologized for the incident, Yoon’s office said in a statement.
Yoon told Bach that the South Korean people were “very shocked and embarrassed” by the incident and asked him to apologize through the media and social media and prevent similar mistakes from happening again. Bach told Yoon that he would take all possible measures to avoid a repeat of the incident, according to Yoon’s office.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams called the error “clearly and deeply regrettable.”
“An operational error was made. We can only apologize, on a night when so much was at stake, for this error,” Adams said in response to a question from a South Korean journalist during a press 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 displayed the correct name.
The mix-up echoed one at the 2012 Olympics in London, where organisers placed the South Korean flag on a giant screen while introducing a North Korean player before a women’s football match, prompting North Koreans to refuse to enter the field for nearly an hour.
In another blunder at Friday’s opening ceremony, the Olympic flag with the five rings was upside down when it was raised toward the end of the ceremony.
“It’s unfortunate,” Adams said. “On a four-hour show, sometimes things happen. We can all get through that, it’s not the end (of the world).”
After the flag was raised, the IOC’s television broadcast did not show any close-up images of the flag. Normally, flagpoles at Olympic ceremonies have a mechanism that allows the breeze to blow over the flag to stretch it. On Friday, the Olympic rings flag hung limply next to the flagpole.
