Training was tougher in South Korea Prepares To Spend $13 Billion On Winter Olympics. Pyeongchang Olympics , II Training was tougher in North Korea, say defectors
The Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium cost roughly $109 million to build for South Korea's 2018 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. The stadium will be used just four times before being demolished.
The $109 million stadium is raising questions about whether hosting the Olympics is worth the cost for cities that don't have existing infrastructure to accommodate the event. The Pyeongchang stadium is one of several new arenas, event spaces and lodging structures built for the Olympics, which could cost South Korea nearly $13 billion.
Despite bold plans to repurpose Olympic buildings, past host cities, such as Rio de Janeiro and Athens, have been left with vacant, decaying sports complexes. Organizers in South Korea are planning to demolish some of the new buildings after the games, rather than risk them becoming white elephants, says Judith Grant-Long, an associate professor of sport management at the University of Michigan and a co-director of the Michigan Center for Sport and Policy.
"It's not so unusual to see temporary facilities used in the context of the Olympics, but this moves the needle towards disposable facilities," she tells Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd. "And I think the cost of this particular venue at approximately $100 million is really making people sit up and take notice about the costs associated with building venues."
The region's modest population is one reason why repurposing the stadium doesn't make much economic sense. There are only about 40,000 people in Pyeongchang County, which makes it almost impossible to regularly fill the new stadium that seats 35,000.
The Olympic Aquatic Center in Athens sits vacant since the 2004 Summer Olympics. Due to Greece's economic frailties post-Olympic Games, there has been no further investment and the majority of the newly constructed stadiums now lie abandoned.
"The other issue with the success of this particular strategy in that location is that South Koreans at this point in time are not particularly a winter sport people," Grant-Long says. "So the idea of creating a tourism strategy that's based on winter sports, skiing and so forth, has not necessarily been a well-received idea from an economic development point of view."
Financial problems after the Olympics and other international sports events are common. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off its debts after the 1976 Olympics. The city's Olympic stadium was recently transformed into a refugee welcome center for asylum seekers entering Canada from the U.S.
Athens spent more than $15 billion to stage the Summer Games in 2004, adding to the country's debt and sparking the current economic turmoil. The games did bring much-needed development to the metro system, highways and an airport, but graffiti-covered stadiums remain unused.
In Rio, organizers are still staring down $40 million in debt incurred during the 2016 summer games after ambitious plans to convert arenas into schools collapsed. And the $550 million World Cup stadium in Brasilia, Brazil, was turned into a bus parking lot after the 2015 soccer tournament.
Some remaining tennis courts stand next to the main tennis stadium in Olympic Park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last year. Nearly one year after Rio hosted the first Olympic games in South America, many of the costly venue sites are now shuttered or underused amidst a deep economic crisis in the city.
Experts say most cities that decide to host the Olympics will confront mountains of debt, especially if they don't have the infrastructure already. Construction companies often drive city officials to make higher bids by presenting more elaborate plans.
"If you're going to organize the games, you have to be prepared for financial surprises - I'll put it politely - and debt," Olympic historian David Wallechinsky told NPR last year. "But it can be done, and it has been done. The London Games didn't lose money. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics made a profit, and in fact, that profit has been put to wonderful use."
The 1984 Games generated a $225-million surplus, which has been used to support American Olympic efforts and local youth sports organiztions over the past three decades, according to The Los Angeles Times.
At the end of last year, Paris and Los Angeles were chosen to host the Olympic Games in 2024 and 2028. The International Olympic Committee says the cities were designated because of their plans to use a "record-breaking number of existing and temporary facilities."
Grant-Long says choosing those cities is part of the IOC's goal "to figure out what is a sustainable path forward, and it's either a single site, a set of permanent sites, or really recalibrating the games around a much more modest idea."
The PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games logo is seen at the the Alpensia Ski Jumping Centre in Pyeongchang, South Korea, September 27, 2017. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
Next week in Pyeongchang, for the first time in an Olympics, the North and South are to field a combined women’s ice hockey team as part of a unity effort engineered by South Korean government officials.
It will force coaches and players to overcome wide differences, from training and tactics to diet and motivation.
“In North Korea, training itself is very tough,” Hwangbo told Reuters, standing at an indoor ice rink in Seoul where she was teaching a group of junior high school girls. She was 12 years old when she first started playing the sport.
“There wasn’t an ice rink, so we could play only in winter. We set up a fence around a sports ground and made ice to play there.”
Twenty-two North Korean athletes are in South Korea to compete in the Feb. 9-25 Games in Pyeongchang.
Only a pair of figure skaters officially qualified, while the rest were approved by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) under rules often used to provide opportunities for underdog countries.
The North Koreans are staying at the athletes’ village, though sanctions are complicating the welcome they receive, making it uncertain if they can enjoy the same perks bestowed upon other athletes.
North Koreans have won only two medals in the Winter Olympics, both for speed skating, and both in the early 1990s.
“North Korea is a cold region with a lot of snow, and therefore many ordinary people enjoy diverse winter sports,” said Kim Yong-hyun, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University.
“But athletes do not get a chance to be trained at a world level and there are really few examples of actual achievements.”
HISTORIC HOCKEY TEAM
Six years after Hwangbo and her family defected, she was a member of South Korea’s first national women’s ice hockey team when it competed in the 2003 Asian Winter Games in Japan.At the time, she looked forward to seeing old friends on the North Korea team. “I tried to talk to them but they called me ‘a traitor who betrayed your home country’,” Hwangbo said.
Now, she is sceptical as South Korea prepares to compete with 12 North Korean players, saying the standard of ice hockey in the North had slipped.
“They couldn’t catch up with new trends and are still playing in an old style. They’re lacking a lot,” Hwangbo said.
The team’s Canadian coach, Sarah Murray, voiced concerns over the politically driven combination, but has since said she would work to make sure they develop a “shared mission”.
“I think the North Korean players that will be added to our team, they want to win too,” she told reporters last week.
TOUGH TRAINING, BETTER LIFE
Other North Korean athletes who defected tell a similar story. As a young boxer in North Korea, Choi Hyun-mi, 29, says she often faced brutal training regimes after she was drafted into a training programme at the age of 11.She was one of 20 young boxers hoping to represent North Korea at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
“Everything was competition,” Choi said. “We took showers after running, but the last one who left a shower room had to clean up. Eating was a competition too. Food was limited. It was on a first-come, first-served basis. The one who came early ate more than the one who came late.”
North Korean athletes have done better in the Summer Olympics, with 54 medals, including seven at Rio in 2016, their best overall showing since 1992.
Like Hwangbo, Choi defected to South Korea before she could get a chance to compete at the highest level for the North.
Defectors said it was a myth that North Korean athletes had been threatened with death for losing, but they risked censure if they failed to perform well against politically sensitive rivals such as South Korea, Japan and the United States.
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