Unified Korean team try to focus on game, not politics
GANGNEUNG (Reuters) - For Korea women’s Olympic hockey coach Sarah Murray and her team, Saturday’s clash with Switzerland is still just a game even if the world sees an event loaded with political overtones in the long conflict between North and South Korea.
Murray, a 29-year-old Canadian with no background in international diplomacy, must select 23 players from her roster - recently boosted to 35 to include 12 North Koreans - to suit up for the game in sweaters emblazoned with an image of a unified Korean peninsula.
“We’ve just been preparing by ourselves,” Murray told reporters on Friday after her team’s final full workout before the tournament kicks off.
“We feel like one team. Not that we’re making a political statement, we’re just here to win.”
Nevertheless, politics have loomed large as the two Koreas field a unified team at an Olympic event for the first time.
“Our players have done a great job focusing on the hockey,” she said. “It’s only when they get off the ice and they realize that all the media are here to talk to them that we’re not just one team competing in the Olympics. All the players are the same, they just want to win.”
The countries are still technically at war since a 1953 armistice, though they have resumed talks after a year-long standoff between North Korea and the United States in which an exchange of threats between the heads of state elevated tensions and prompted the North’s continued missile and nuclear tests.