“Unified Korea hockey team is not just PR move”

A unified women’s ice hockey team from North and South Korea at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics is not just political window-dressing, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said.

The North Korea, however, has agreed with South Korea to send 22 athletes and a 230-strong cheering squad to the Winter Games starting on Friday. Twelve of those athletes will compete as part of a unified women’s ice hockey team in what is the strongest gesture of Olympic cooperation between the two countries in years. “I really believe in the Olympic spirit,” Bach told reporters when asked whether the joint Korea team was a PR move or if there was political substance.

“These athletes and many million other people, they will believe in this gesture and the athletes are going to show it,” said Bach, adding he knew the feeling of division having competed as a fencer at the 1976 Summer Olympics for what was then West Germany.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, an increasingly prominent figure in the country’s leadership, will be part of the North’s delegation to the South Korean Winter Olympics.

Kim Yo Jong, believed to be around 30, will be the first member of North Korea’s ruling family to visit South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. Analysts say her inclusion in the Olympic delegation shows North Korea’s ambition to use the Olympics to break out from diplomatic isolation by improving relations with the South, which it could use as a bridge for approaching the United States.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s office welcomed North Korea’s decision, saying it showed the North’s willingness to cooperate in easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Kim Yo Jong will meet with Moon, a liberal who has expressed a desire to reach out to the North.