‘Sports Diplomacy’: The Olympic Selfie Bringing North and South Koreans Together (2024)

“This is probably the most meaningful image of this Olympics,” a social media post on the Chinese platform Weibo declared Tuesday, after China won the gold medal in table tennis mixed doubles at the 2024 Games in Paris.

But in the now-viral photo of the medalists taking a selfie on the podium, the Chinese athletes are the least of people’s focus. Instead, stealing the show are the North Korean silver medalists and South Korean bronze medalists, who were seen huddling together at a time of simmering tensions back home.

The Victory Selfie—as coined by the Olympics organizers—has become a trend at the Paris Olympics, after the practice was not allowed in prior Olympics. This year, however, medalists have been able to snap photos of themselves on the podium using phones from sponsor Samsung, the South Korean conglomerate.

The Korean Peninsula (and China) selfie comes as bilateral relations between Seoul and Pyongyang are perhaps at their lowest since the Korean War. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared in January that the North would no longer seek peaceful reunification with the South and that he has “no intention of avoiding” war. And in recent months, North Korea has stepped up its missile testing and flown trash- and poop-filled balloons over the border in response to the propaganda leaflets that South Korean activists have sent the other way.

Despite North Korea long being an outcast in world politics, it has taken a different approach in athletics, seeing sports as a way to humanize its regime—what has come to be known as “sports diplomacy.” (Kim Jong-un is so into basketball that he famously formed an unlikely friendship with former NBA star Dennis Rodman, while his late father, Kim Jong-il, was known for his love for golf.)

International sporting events like the Olympics provide a rare arena for civilian interactions between North and South Korea, which are technically still at war with each other. The two Koreas marched together under one flag at both the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games, as well as the 2006 Winter Games. (They also marched together for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, though a similar plan for the Paralympics fell through after the two sides couldn’t agree on a flag.) And at the 2016 Rio Olympics, another selfie taken by South Korean gymnast Lee Eun-ju and her North Korean counterpart Hong Un-jong went viral and was hailed as a testament to how sports transcends politics.

Last year, South Korean weightlifter Kim Su-hyeon shared stories of warm interactions with the North Korean rivals she sees regularly at meets, including the time a North Korean coach approached her and told her to “keep it up” at the Asian Games last year. But at the same Games, South Korean basketballer Kang Lee-seul said she was “a little disappointed” that her North Korean counterparts completely ignored her even when she called out to them—despite the athletes from the two sides previously playing together in a joint team in the 2018 Asian Games.

North Korea has also sought to host international sporting events of its own, including an annual amateur golf tournament held on the same golf course used by Kim Jong-un. And leaders of the two Koreas have for years toyed with the idea of co-hosting the World Cup or the Olympics, though such efforts have been repeatedly stalled amid straining diplomatic ties.

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At the Paris Summer Games, the first Olympics that North Korea is participating in after missing Tokyo because of the pandemic, 16 North Korean athletes are competing in events ranging from table tennis to gymnastics to wrestling.

The Paris Games started off a bit rockier—at the opening ceremony, the South Korean contingent was introduced as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the official name for North Korea, sparking dismay among South Koreans and their leaders and prompting an apology from the organizers. But the selfie has since been hailed as exemplifying “the true spirit of the Olympics.”

The athletes themselves didn’t have much to say about their historic picture or each other. On Tuesday, Lim Jong-hoon, the South Korean paddler who took the selfie, gave only a brief answer to reporters asking about his team’s interactions with the North Koreans. “When they introduced the silver medalists, we congratulated them both. Otherwise we really didn’t speak to each other,” he said.

Meanwhile, when reporters later asked if the North Korean team felt any “rivalry” against their South Korean counterparts, North Korean player Kim Kum-yong simply said: “No, we did not.”