PARIS (AP) — Olympic Games organizers said they “deeply apologize” for presenting South Korean athletes as North Korea during the opening ceremony in Paris.
As South Korean athletes waved their country’s flag on a boat sailing down the River Seine on Friday night, they were announced in French and English as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. South Korea is the Republic of Korea.
“We deeply apologize for the error that occurred in presenting the Korean team during the opening ceremony broadcast,” the International Olympic Committee said in a post on X in Korean.
Jang Mi Ran, second vice minister of South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, requested a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach about the incident, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday. He said the ministry also asked South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to lodge “a strong government-level complaint” with the French government.
The statement said South Korea’s Olympic committee had separately asked Paris Games organizers to prevent similar incidents from recurring.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams on Saturday called the error “clearly deeply regrettable.”
“An operational error was made. We can only apologize, on a night of so many moving parts, that this error was made,” Adams said in response to a question from a South Korean journalist during a news conference.
The Korean peninsula has been sharply divided into South Korea and North Korea since the end of World War II in 1945.
The blue sign on the boat carrying the South Korean athletes showed the correct name.
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Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul and Graham Dunbar in Paris contributed to this report.
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