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North, S. Korea to field joint team for Beijing Olympics

Jonathan Watts

— PHOTO: AP

North and South Korean athletes wave a unification flag at the 4th East Asian Games in Macau last week.

SEOUL: North and South Korea will re-unite at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 by fielding a joint team for the first time since the troubled peninsula was divided 60 years ago.

The sporting union, which was announced on Tuesday, is the most symbolic in a recent series of moves toward rapprochement across the world's last cold war border. Seoul and Pyongyang have yet to sign a peace treaty since the bloody 1950-53 Korean War, which claimed millions of lives on both sides.

They have been bitter sporting as well as political rivals. North Korea boycotted the 1988 Seoul Olympics and football matches between the two countries have often caused security concerns. But the atmosphere has warmed considerably since a summit between the countries' leaders in 2000. Teams from the two marched together at the Sydney and Athens Olympics, and at the opening ceremony of the East Asia Games, now under way in Macau. But apart from a brief experiment in table tennis and football in the 90s, athletes from the two sides have been rivals rather than team mates.

Sporting officials from the two countries said it was now time to take a step forward, first by fielding a joint team at the next Asian Games and then at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

``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, told Reuters. ``As exchanges between South and North Korea have been progressing, the mood was ripe for reaching such an agreement.''

The two sides issued a joint statement that said they would meet on December 7 in the North's border city of Kaesong to discuss how to select and train athletes.

If chosen on sporting rather than political grounds, the team is likely to have a strong South Korean bias. Athletes in the impoverished North are disadvantaged by a lack of facilities and — for much of the past decade — food shortages.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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