The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [104]
It was generally accepted that an Asian city would have first claim as host in 1988, following Mexico City (1968), Munich (1972), Montreal (1976), Moscow (1980), and Los Angeles (1984). For this reason, Seoul's most important competitor was Japan's entry, the city of Nagoya. Seoul had several advantages. Japan, a developed country, had already hosted one Olympics. Because of the intense rivalry between the two Koreas, which had often been played out in UN General Assembly votes, South Korea had embassies and consulates in nearly all third-world countries, which made up the bulk of the Olympics participants, while Japan had substantially fewer. Furthermore, many developing countries were sympathetic to one of their own.
In the end, Seoul simply worked harder. Four months before the voting, Chung Ju Yung, chairman of the giant Hyundai group, was named chairman of the committee to bring the Olympics to Seoul. As the vote approached, he and other Korean industrialists traveled widely, wining and dining Olympic committee delegates of other countries. South Korean prime minister Lho Shin Yong led an intense lobbying campaign with foreign diplomats in the corridors of the annual UN General Assembly session in New York.
In September 1981, when the Olympic delegates arrived at Baden Baden, West Germany, for the voting, they found impressive scale models of the Olympic Village that Seoul pledged to construct for the games. They were also greeted by dazzling smiles from dozens of Korea's most beautiful young women, including five former Miss Koreas and ten beautiful Korean Air Lines hostesses. According to a member of the victorious Korean delegation, Chung spent several million dollars in obtaining goodwill the same way he won construction contracts for Hyundai in the Middle East, with offers of airplane tickets, women, and money to any wavering delegates. Korea won over Japan by a resounding two-to-one margin.
North Korea was slow to react to the South's Olympic victory. It was more than two months after Seoul was awarded the games that Nodong Sinmun informed its readers, "Recently South Korean military fascists have been mobilizing high-ranking officials and related staff of the puppet government as well as pro-government trumpeters to raise a ridiculous hullabaloo every day about the Olympics, which are said to be going to be held in Seoul in 1988. Now the puppets of South Korea are approaching socialist nations and nonaligned countries in the hope of establishing diplomatic and official relations in order to have their `state' recognized as a legitimate one."
As the time for the games approached, Pyongyang became less flippant and more apprehensive, portraying the issue to its communist allies in momentous terms. In June 1985, Hwang Jang Yop, then secretary for international affairs of the Workers Party, wrote the East German Socialist Unity (Communist) Party that the Seoul games were not merely an athletic issue but "an important political question touching on the basic interests of world revolution, of whether the attraction of socialism or capitalism will be strengthened on the Korean peninsula."
Following a suggestion from Cuba's Fidel Castro, North Korea proposed that the Seoul Olympics be recast as the "Chosun games" or the "Pyongyang-Seoul games," with North Korea as cohost, sharing equally in the sports events as well as the television revenues. North Korea insisted to its allies that "if the U.S.A. and the South Korean puppets do not accept our justified suggestions, then the socialist countries-as in the case of the Olympic games in Los Angeles -should collectively carry out a mighty strike and stand up against holding the games