Olympic organizers apologize for introducing South Korean athletes as North Korea

PARIS (AP) — 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.

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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.

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Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul and Graham Dunbar in Paris contributed to this report.

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