North Korea just announced it will send a delegation of athletes to the Winter Olympic Games. Win or lose, it will be pitiful.
As soon as the North Koreans pass the border and arrive at Pyeongchang, the snowy site of the games, they will be at an immediate disadvantage. As a general rule, command economies that struggle to feed their own people do not excel at producing world-class Olympic athletes.
History bears this out. While the North Koreans have competed in the Winter Olympics since 1964 and the Summer Olympics since 1972, their medal count is historically dismal with a total of 56 medals (South Korea has racked up 320). Even as control of Pyongyang changes from regime to regime, the nation’s record has not improved and the reason is more economic and political than athletic.
There isn’t anything inherently inferior about the athletes born north of the DMZ. It’s just that their circumstances determine their athletic abilities. North Korea can’t produce the wealth needed for leisure, that prerequisite for things like amateur athletics.
For example, when North Korea hosted a marathon in its capital city earlier this year, just 240 runners staggered to the finish line. As my colleague Tom Rogan pointed out, that doesn’t compare with the London Marathon, which attracts 40,000 runners annually, or the New York City Marathon’s 50,000.
That’s not surprising. Nutrition is so poor and economic conditions so bleak in North Korea, that domestic amateurs would rather stay home than incur the cost of competing. And so, like the Soviet Union before it, North Korea has its own athletic programs for propaganda purposes, namely to project a picture of health and strength.
Both its occasional successes and frequent losses underscore the same lie. While almost half of the nation remains malnourished, most of North Korea’s medals come from weightlifting (17), martial arts (16), and wrestling (10). Win and drive away in a Mercedes or maybe move into a luxury apartment. Lose and prepare for hard labor.
North Korean judo champion Lee Chang-Soo experienced both. A Bronze Medal at the 1989 World Judo Championships in Yugoslavia earned him a prized membership in the communist party, along with plenty of cash. A loss at the Beijing Asian Games in 1990 earned him a stay at the Gulag.
“I was sent to a coal mine for the first time because I lost against a South Korean,” Lee told Reuters. “Then I was sent to work in a boiler room just because I talked back to the deputy chairman of the squad.”
Lee would later defect in Spain, something that’s no doubt on the mind of each of the North Korean athletes preparing to compete at the winter games next month.
