Foreign journalists get taste of the Special Olympic spirit

David Miller, a British sports journalist who covered the Olympics for more than 50 years, was skeptical going into YongPyong Dome Tuesday night as the opening ceremony unfurled a procession of formal speech-making for the Special Olympics in PyeongChang, Gangwon Province.

Miller’s skepticism was perhaps unsurprising for a veteran sports journalist. He was a senior staff reporter for The Times of London for 15 years and had been covering the Olympics since the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He has seen it all.

After the opening ceremony in PyeongChang, among the throng of spectators and athletes ― including political bigwigs and other VIPs such as a former Bulgarian president, basketball star Yao Ming and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi ― who had spilled out of the auditorium and onto the front entrance red carpet on a wintry Gangwon night, Miller’s skepticism appeared to have washed away.

“It was an absolutely amazing opening reception,” he said. “The Koreans really outdid themselves. The formal side and the entertainment side both ― just fantastic.”

Miller’s reaction was telling because he has seen dozens of opening ceremonies over the decades. 

He is in Korea with nine other foreign correspondents as part of a government program designed to showcase PyeongChang and promote Korea’s hosting of the 2018 Winter Olympics. It seems to have worked. The very same venues being used during the Special Olympics will be used in five years time at the Winter Games.

The Korean Culture and Information Service invited 10 senior sports journalists, some of them covering athletes and games, and others the sports business and the industry side of the Olympics. The reporters hailed from media outlets based in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France and Japan, including NBC Sports in the U.S., France’s L’quipe and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun.

The reporters arrived in Korea on Jan. 27 for a seven-day tour of popular sites as well as press briefings. In addition to attending the opening ceremony in PyeongChang, they visited the corporate office of locally ubiquitous social messenger Kakao Talk, and a press conference by Jacques Rogge, International Olympic Committee president, and Kim Jin-sun, president of the PyeongChang Organizing Committee for the 2018 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The journalists depart on Feb. 2.

Seeing the Special Olympics and some of the athletes up close will likely have a major positive impact on the foreign correspondents.

“My experience from covering the London Olympics in 2012 and the Paralympics is that they can change preconceptions of disabilities,” said Duncan Mackay, an editor at Inside The Games, a media outlet dedicated to covering the Olympics.

Competitions like the Paralympics, and Special Olympics in PyeongChang, can have a huge impact in changing preconceptions of disabilities, whether they are physical or intellectual, MacKay said.

“When you see an event like this up close, and see the effort that the athletes put into it, what people can achieve and what holds them back, preconceptions of intellectual disabilities change,” he said.

As a division of the Ministry of Culture, KOCIS’ singular mission is promoting Korea in foreign countries, and does so by inviting reporters, specialists and VIPs here. It has what it describes as resident officers ― about 40 working in some 30 countries around the world ― to build a “Korean brand.”

By Philip Iglauer (ephilip2011@heraldcorp.com)