North Korean Women's Hockey Team Members Won't Get Nike Gear
Allowing the North Korean members of the unified women’s Olympic hockey team to use certain brands of high-quality hockey sticks and jerseys could represent a violation of United Nations sanctions.
At least that’s what South Korean government officials are mulling over heading into the start of the 2018 Winter Olympics. This year’s 23rd Winter Olympiad will take place in the snowy passes and newly built ice arenas of the South’s PyeongChang County, and the Games’ hosts are reportedly struggling to accommodate their North Korean counterparts – and now team mates on several unified teams – jointly representing the people of the Korean Peninsula. The latest potential controversy comes down to the matter of a ban on luxury goods making their way into the hands of North Korean nationals, and – wouldn’t you know it – “recreational sports equipment” like hockey equipment (particularly American-made gear) is of particular concern for South Korea’s event organizers.
That’s because the last time a team from the so-called Hermit Kingdom made a prominent appearance at a major international tournament – in this case a 2017 tournament in New Zealand – female players showed up to compete using well-worn, even battered and cracking, hockey sticks. Showrunners from New Zealand Hockey Federation intervened, allowing the North Korean team to use up-to-date carbon fiber sticks throughout the tournament, even if players had to return them after the competitions conclusion, lest they break the rules of the Western sanctions.
Hoping to avoid creating an international scandal (given the greater likelihood that players from the North could abscond with forbidden sporting goods), South Korea is taking the matter of sticking to the sanctions quite seriously. They have even going as far as to require the International Ice Hockey Federation to loan Finnish-built hockey sticks to North Korean players on the women’s team. They’ve even made sure that athletes from the North wear Finnish-made jerseys rather than ones supplied to other Olympians by Nike, a major PyeongChang 2018 sponsor.
South Korea has really gone the extra mile to make sure it’s sporting olive branch with the North goes off without a hitch, and their kowtowing to American foreign policy in this regard seems to know no bounds. The South’s government had to petition for US approval just so its women’s hockey players could take a charter plane from Seoul up north for some joint training with their Communist counterparts. The South Korean officials also had to book an Airbus-built jet from the Asiana airline’s fleet for their training trip (and not an American-built Boeing) in order to bring their Olympic team mates back with them from North Korea. This is due to another US regulation that stipulates no American plane is eligible for reentry into the US for six months after landing on North Korean soil.
The American government isn’t the only source of criticism in advance of the history-making unified women’s Olympic hockey team either. Conservative politicians in South Korea are also currently running the gamut between skeptical (at best) and outright appalled at some of the decisions made by their northern neighbor’s government. North Korea practically trolled the “free world” by waiting until the last minute to announce just who would be in its official Winter Olympics delegation, eventually listing national leader Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong as well as North Korea’s National Sports Guidance Committee Chairman Choe Hwi would make the trip to PyeongChang. That was particularly worrying to South Korean officials and event organizers, as Kim and Choe are both currently blacklisted by the US Treasury (of all government organizations) as their United Nations Security Council for their involvement in North Korea’s “ongoing and serious human rights abuses and censorship activities.”
Despite all the rigmarole surrounding the provenance of the Korean women’s Olympic hockey team, the squad’s opponents on the ice most likely don’t have very much to worry about no matter whether the North Korean players uses Nike sticks and jerseys. The leading legal offshore sports betting site for US bettors, Bovada.lv, is listing the unified Korean women’s team with long odds indeed: a +25000 moneyline puts them in dead last on the betting board. The USA women’s team boasting the top spot with -130 odds to win, followed by Canada, which has odds of +110. Finland, the supplier of the loophole-exploiting hockey gear, is way back too, making do with +1600 olympic betting odds.
As crazy as the whole situation surrounding the unified women’s hockey team has become, it pales in comparison (at least in terms of cost) to the back-and-forth decision by South Korean technology giant Samsung. The company will donate a copy of its latest-and-greatest $1,100 mobile phone to each and every Olympian competing at PyeongChang – well, except for those from North Korea (who wouldn’t be allowed by their own government handlers to use the phones to access the internet anyway) and Iran. North Korea and Iran are both constantly under some form of US-led international condemnation for their nuclear ambitions (though only North Korea purports to be developing long-range nuclear weapons capabilities) and alleged human rights abuses but have been allowed to make an appearance at the Winter Olympics anyway in a show of good will.