PARIS — Olympic Video games organizers mentioned they “deeply apologize” for introducing South Korea’s athletes as North Korea throughout the opening ceremony in Paris.
Because the South Korean athletes waved their nation’s flag on a ship floating down the Seine River on Friday night, they had been introduced in each French and English because the Democratic Folks’s Republic of Korea. South Korea is the Republic of Korea.
“We deeply apologize for the error that occurred when introducing the Korean staff throughout the opening ceremony broadcast,” the Worldwide Olympic Committee mentioned in a put up on X in Korean.
Jang Mi Ran, the second vice minister of South Korea’s Tradition, Sports activities and Tourism Ministry, requested a gathering with IOC President Thomas Bach over the incident, the ministry mentioned in an announcement Saturday. It mentioned the ministry additionally requested South Korea’s Overseas Ministry to file “a powerful government-level criticism” with the French authorities.
The assertion mentioned South Korea’s Olympic committee individually requested the organizers of the Paris Video games to stop the recurrence of comparable incidents.
IOC spokesperson Mark Adams on Saturday referred to as the error “clearly deeply regrettable.”
“An operational mistake was made. We are able to solely apologize, in a night of so many shifting components, that this error was made,” Adams mentioned in response to a query from a South Korean journalist throughout a information convention.
The Korean peninsula has been bitterly divided into South Korea and North Korea because the finish of World Conflict II in 1945.
The blue signal on the boat carrying the South Korean athletes did present the proper identify.
The combination-up echoed one other throughout the 2012 Olympics in London, the place organizers posted the South Korean flag on a jumbo display as a North Korean participant was launched earlier than a girls’s soccer match, main the North Koreans to refuse to take the sphere for practically an hour.
In one other opening ceremony glitch Friday, the Olympic flag that includes the 5 rings was the wrong way up when it was hoisted towards the tip of the ceremony.
“It’s regrettable,” Adams mentioned. “In a four-hour present often issues occur. We are able to all transfer on from that one, it’s not the tip (of the world).”
After the flag was raised, the published by the IOC’s personal tv operations didn’t present any close-up photos of it. Usually, flagpoles at Olympic ceremonies have a mechanism that blows a breeze throughout the flag to stretch it out. On Friday, the Olympic rings flag hung limply down subsequent to the pole.
