乐鱼体育

North Korean military provocations derailed Seoul鈥檚 plans to host the 1970 Asian Games

Sporting events on the Korean Peninsula have a tendency to become highly political.

Most recently, the allowed South Korea and North Korea to calm tensions on the peninsula and to deliberate over a possible reunification sometime in the future. Simultaneously, the Games served to illustrate South Korea鈥檚 respectable position within the international community and North Korea鈥檚 status as an outsider.

In this sense, the 2018 Winter Games were not much different from a number of earlier, major sporting events taking place south of the demarcation line:  the , the Asian Games events in 1986, 1999, 2002, and 2014, and the FIFA Soccer World Cup in 2002 (co-hosted with Japan). The corresponding negotiations between the North and South Korean governments, the displays of hard and soft power, the pompous public events (sometimes featuring cooperation between South and North Korean athletes), and also commercial interests should not draw attention away from one very important fact: all these games actually took place.

In contrast, the , the first big international sporting event that South Korea attempted to host, never materialized.

The Games in Seoul, scheduled to include a large number of delegations from pro-American and non-aligned Asian countries, would have been a boon to South Korea鈥檚 international credentials. The transactions of the Special Council Congress  of the Asian Games Federation鈥攖he body which administered the Asian Games since the first event in New Delhi 1951, now called the 鈥攕how why the event eventually shifted to Bangkok.

During the , Seoul was elected to host the games鈥� sixth installment planned for 1970. But as early as 1967, rumors spread that South Korea was having problems planning for the event. Initially, the Straits Times and other regional newspapers reported that South Korean president Park Chung Hee had come to the conclusion that the Games would be .

Transactions from the Special Council Congress show that, in 1968, the president of South Korea鈥檚 National Olympic Committee provided another, much more drastic reason. He explained that:

since mid-summer of 1967, daily infiltrations into the Republic of Korea grew in intensity until January 21 this year (1968)[,] when 31 North Korean Communist soldiers, each of them fully armed[,] reached nearly 300 meters from [sic] the Presidential Residence of Chung Hee Park of the Republic of Korea. Their sole suicidal mission was to annihilate every occupant in the Presidential Residence, including the President himself.

These daily infiltrations鈥斺�攈ad already resulted in the complete to tourists. Altogether, these tensions brought on by North Korea meant that even the South Korean dictatorship could not guarantee safety and security at the Games, including for foreign participants.

(As was demonstrated some years later, international sporting events could indeed serve as a platform to gain massive media attention through terrorism and violence. In 1972, during the so-called 鈥淢unich Massacre,鈥� Arab terrorists managed to murder a large number of members of Israel鈥檚 Olympic team. Before that, at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, no such violence occurred, but the People鈥檚 Republic of China had used the media focus on Japan to detonate its first nuclear bomb, hardly an act appreciated by the Japanese.)

The games ultimately , the capital of another pro-American dictatorship also facing a massive cross-border conflict, this time due to the Vietnam War.

The transactions of the Asian Games Federation from May 1968 reveal that only Japan and Thailand were considered to be viable candidates to host the Sixth Asian Games without delay. The Japanese, however, declined since they were already hosting the .

At first, the Thai government was also reluctant to come to the aid of the South Korea, in part because Thailand had already saved the Southeast Asian Peninsular Games of 1967. More important, on June 10, 1968, the Thai dictator Thanom Kittikachorn explained to a desperate Asian Games Federation subcommittee that hosting the 1970 Games would be financially impossible because of a 鈥渄aily increase of Communist infiltrations into Thailand, which entailed increased expenditure.鈥�

Thailand鈥檚 security and financial woes were apparently papered over, in part to due to Seoul鈥檚 largesse. South Korea to Thailand, and other member countries also pledged financial support. The authority over the Sixth Games was then formally .

The leadership in Seoul would not try to host another large international sporting event until 1986 and 1988, by which time Cold War geopolitics in East Asia had radically changed, South Korea had turned into a major economic power, and the country had begun to transition from an authoritarian military regime to a democracy. Altogether, the new geopolitical situation facilitated hosting sporting events, especially because the North Korean government during the late 1980s was less willing to disrupt them than it had been during the late 1960s.