Two Koreas to compete as single team at Games

SEOUL (Reuters) – North and South Korea agreed on Tuesday
to compete as a single team for the first time at the 2006
Asian Games, and at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, a South
Korean official said.

North and South Korea have been bitter ideological — and
sporting — rivals for more than 50 years and are gradually
building closer relations across the Demilitarised Zone.

“We had discussed making a single team since we jointly
marched in such international events six times,” Baek Sung-il,
a spokesman for South Korea’s Olympic Committee, said by
telephone from Macau.

“As exchanges between South and North Korea have been
progressing, the mood was ripe for reaching such an agreement.”

Both Koreas are taking part in the East Asia Games in
Macau. They marched together at that opening ceremony and more
notably at the Sydney and Athens Olympics, but have not
competed as one team at such major events.

Baek said the two sides would meet again in Kaesong, a city
just north of the Demilitarised Zone, on December 7 to discuss
the details of how to form a joint team.

Prior to the East Asia Games in Macau, North Korea
suggested that the sports officials from the two Koreas try and
thrash out details of forming joint teams on the sidelines of
the event, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

The selection process for the joint team and its budget
have yet to be worked out, Yonhap cited South Korean sports
officials in Macau as saying.

The communist North and capitalist South formed a single
table tennis team and a soccer team in the 1990s but the
experiment did not continue.

At the 2004 Athens Olympics, North Korea won five medals
while South Korea won 30. Their joint total of 35 would have
been good enough for seventh on the medals list between Japan
and France.