PARIS (AP) — Olympic organizers say they “deeply apologize” for referring to South Korean athletes as North Koreans during the opening ceremony in Paris.
As South Korean athletes waved their flags on boats along the Seine on Friday evening, announcements were made in both French and English reading “Democratic People's Republic of Korea” – the Republic of Korea.
“We deeply apologize for the mistake that occurred when introducing the Korean team during the broadcast of the Opening Ceremony,” the International Olympic Committee said in a post on its Korean-language website X.
Jang Mi-ran, second vice minister at South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, has requested a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach about the incident, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday. The ministry also said it had asked South Korea's foreign ministry to submit a “strong complaint at the government level” to the French government.
The South Korean Olympic Committee separately asked Paris organizers to prevent a recurrence of a similar incident, according to the statement.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Saturday that the mistake was “obviously deeply regrettable.”
“An operational error was made and I can only apologise for the error occurring on a night when so much was moving,” Adams said at a news conference in response to a question from a South Korean journalist.
The Korean Peninsula has been bitterly divided between South Korea and North Korea since the end of World War II in 1945.
The blue sign on the boat carrying the Korean athletes had their correct names on it.
In another malfunction at the opening ceremony, the Olympic flag was found upside down when it was raised towards the end of the ceremony.
“It's unfortunate,” Adams said. “In a four-hour show, sometimes things happen. We can bounce back from this. It's not the end of the world.”
The IOC's television broadcast did not show any close-up footage of the flag after it was raised. Normally, the flagpole at Olympic ceremonies has a mechanism that allows the flag to stretch in the wind. On Friday, the Olympic flag was hanging loosely at its side.
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Associated Press writers Hyun-jin Kim in Seoul and Graham Dunbar in Paris contributed to this report.
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
