The Worlds That Are Watching: Media,Politics,Diplomacy,and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics

Introduction: Monitoring the Mega-Event

In reviewing Andrews and Carrington’s (2013) major reference work A Companion to Sport, Bairner (2014) remarks, “For this reader, the coverage of mega-events has surely reached saturation point. Is there anything more to be said?” Bairner is presumably reacting to the growing corpus of books on sport mega-events (among which are Büch, Maennig, & Schulke, 2011; Roche, 2000, 2017; Tomlinson & Young, 2006; Wenner & Billings, 2017), as well as to the vast amount of public relations and news material about them. Those who bid for, host, fund, and live with the legacy of sport mega-events (Rowe, 2012) would no doubt disagree with Bairner—provided, presumably, that what was said about them was generally in accord with their own expressed sentiments.

In contrast, my disagreement with Bairner is on the basis that, while much of what is written about sport mega-events may be predictable and repetitive (not to mention banal, superficial, manipulative, self-serving, or deluded), there is still wide scope and a pressing need to speak of any recurrent sociocultural phenomenon. Indeed, already very familiar facets of human society, ranging from primary groups like the family to social institutions such as education or the media, still demand our attention no matter how much has previously been said and written about them. Sport mega-events are no different in this regard. It is important not to become jaded by the sheer volume of information and discourse about hype-laden events such as the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup because, like society itself, they have familiar structural properties as well as the capacity for unpredictability and surprise. Indeed, if one recent sport mega-event has revealed their interest and importance, it would be the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea (the Republic of Korea). These Games suddenly became a key subject for global media, especially the sections not devoted explicitly to sport, when North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) unexpectedly announced its intention to participate in them barely a month before its scheduled opening ceremony.

In this article, I explore some of the representation of PyeongChang 2018 among English-language media, principally in Australasia and the United Kingdom. This selection of media was determined by exigencies relating to my “brief,” the time available and language. I was asked a month before the Games ¹ to reflect on how the media in Oceania (which includes Australasia) and Europe (in which the United Kingdom is located) responded to the event and to present the analysis 2 months after the event finished. Australasian and British media were used primarily on linguistic and access grounds, but several U.S. media sources are also cited. This is because, given the difficult financial circumstances currently experienced by mainstream media, many national and metropolitan newspapers rely increasingly on syndicated material from international news agencies, such as Reuters and Bloomberg, and on other countries’ publications, such as the New York Times and Washington Post. This is a practice of long-standing, as is the syndication of material across global media corporations such as 21st-Century Fox/News Corp. Economic and copyright constraints have also in some cases led to smaller travelling media contingents and greater reliance on third parties. The digitization of media has seen the same material flow across and between national newspapers and international news websites such as the Guardian and Daily Mail “stables.” In this fluid, increasingly globalized media environment, national media systems have become more flexible and permeable, although the nation remains a powerful discursive pivot, not least when it is compellingly mobilized (as, for example, occurred with England during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia—e.g., Katwala, 2018) via international sport.

There is, then, no claim that this is a systematic quantitative and qualitative content analysis like, for example, the 2011 International Sports Press Survey (Horky & Nieland, 2013). Instead, it is a provisional discursive exploration of the main thematic currents of media coverage evident to the author at various stages as the Games passed from being in prospect to taking place to being appraised in rapid retrospect. Inevitably, the article has elements of narrative description, as it traces the unfolding of the event and the media discourses surrounding it. In the process, and well beyond the specific instance in question, it can be seen that each sport event of this kind has much in common with those preceding and succeeding it, but also displays unique characteristics that can never be replicated in space or time. Therefore, the analysis seeks to derive some “first-run” lessons from PyeongChang 2018 alongside sporting and other cultural events that have already happened and are yet to be conceived. It should also be acknowledged that, although much of the discussion here applies both to the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games and the Paralympic Winter Games, most of the media coverage addressed concerns the Winter Olympics, which dominated coverage. North Korea’s participation in the Paralympics, furthermore, was only confirmed after the Winter Olympics had been held (BBC, 2018a), by which time the highly intense media attention had subsided. Given the relationship between the events (Darcy, Frawley, & Adair, 2017; Gilbert & Schantz, 2008) and North Korea’s involvement in them, the shorthand term “PyeongChang 2018” when used here generally covers both the Olympics and Paralympics.

Before going further, it is necessary to recognise that, despite its scale and prominence, the Winter Games is of limited global sporting interest compared with, say, the single-sport FIFA World Cup held in the same year, which is exclusively focused on the “global game,” or the multi-sport Summer Olympics. As Müller (2015, p. 627) has observed, some scholars in the field judge the Winter Olympics to be a second order rather than a mega-event. According to his model of four key, constitutive dimensions of mega-events—visitor attractiveness, mediated reach, cost and transformative impact—and applied to selected recent events, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics is a mega-event, but comes just behind the Guangzhou 2010 Asian Games, and well behind the London 2012 Summer Olympics, the 2012 UEFA European Championship in Ukraine/Poland, the 2010 Football World Cup in South Africa, and, as a nonsporting event, the 2010 Shanghai Expo (p. 636). This is not to deny that the Winter Olympics is a highly significant event in the world but to recognise its relatively limited sporting appeal. The Games’ mediated reach is strong, in part due to the lavish nature of the opening and closing ceremonies that garner general news coverage and attract the attention of nonsport audiences. In 2018, a record 92 nations participated, which equalled that of the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics (although the latter was affected by an anti-apartheid boycott by 29 IOC member nations). But, to become particularly newsworthy, the Winter Olympics requires an extra dimension, as in the case of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics corruption scandal (Wenn, Barney, & Martyn, 2011) or the human rights and doping issues that surrounded the 2014 Sochi Winter Games (Orttung & Zhemukhov, 2017). All mega-events seek global media attention for more than the sporting action, ranging from grand narratives of national and civic progress to simple tourism place marketing, not least in East Asia (Mangan, Qing, & Collins, 2012). The hosts always attempt to control how they are seen, but it is a condition of receiving the media gaze that its interpretive schema are out of their hands. It is for this reason that, while the rewards of running a successful sport tournament are many, the risks are also considerable.

Bid and Lead-Up

The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games were subject, in terms of media scrutiny (and in other respects), to the different phases of mega-event hosting. These I have previously described as the bid, lead-up, event, and legacy (Rowe, 2012). Each phase can be relatively unremarkable or, itself, attract intense media coverage—consider, for example, the huge controversy over the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups (Mersiades, 2018; Rowe, 2016), or the intense struggle for the two summer Olympics prior to China’s final success in winning the rights to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, or the aforementioned 2002 Winter Games imbroglio. In contrast, the bidding for the 2018 Winter Olympics was relatively low key, with only three bidders and PyeongChang winning easily in the first round in July 2011 (in Durban, South Africa) against rival bids from Europe (Munich and Annecy). Perhaps it was felt that it was, at the third time of asking, PyeongChang’s “turn,” especially given the more general pivot towards Asia (especially to East Asia) in world sport that had seen the Summer Olympics and FIFA World Cup, though notably not the Winter Olympics, already held in Asia in the 21st century (which will host the 2020 summer Games in Tokyo). The heavy financial and strategic involvement of the Samsung conglomerate was of some concern, with suggestions that the independence of the Games from commerce had been compromised to some degree (Gibson, 2011; Merkel & Misuk, 2011), but this arrangement was not deeply controversial, given that the Games have been markedly commercial since the so-called 1984 Hamburger Olympics in Los Angeles (Tomlinson, 2006).

It is also necessary to emphasize that the word “global” tends to be used very loosely and that even with mega-events, there is considerable unevenness in interest around the world. Thus, in Australasia and in Western and Southern Europe, where winter sports are of relatively minor interest, the Winter Olympics does not really come into view until the Games are more-or-less imminent, unless there is a major political controversy or scandal. By contrast, in Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, for example, winter sports are more popular, and there is greater attention to all aspects of them—not least because they have frequently been Games’ hosts and have won many medals. In the lead-up, there is gathering concern with the selection of teams and the prospects of winning medals but, again, this media and public interest relates to the likelihood of athletic success. Hosting the Games guarantees both positive and negative media coverage (see, for example, Sugden and Tomlinson’s, 2012, collection on the 2012 London Olympics and Larson and Park’s, 1993, book on the 1988 Seoul Olympics). In other words, the level and duration of media coverage in different nations tend to be directly proportional to their material and symbolic investment in the Games.

As the Games approach, media stories begin to appear about the progress of their preparation. Following the conventional wisdom that bad news is generally more newsworthy than good, there is a genre of news reporting that highlights building delays, logistical problems, local protests, disappointing ticket sales, and so on. Consider, for example, the extensive media coverage of unpreparedness and lateness (2004 Athens Olympics, 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, 2014 Brazil FIFA World Cup) and prospects of violence, political protests, and human rights controversies (1968 Mexico Olympics, 1988 Seoul Olympics, 2008 Beijing Olympics, 2010 Vancouver Olympics, 2010 South Africa FIFA World Cup, 2014 Sochi Olympics, 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, 2018 Russia FIFA World Cup).

For a long period in much of Europe and Australasia, there was not much media coverage in the lead-up to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. There were routine stories about local apathy and low ticket sales, especially regarding the Paralympics (e.g., Rumsby, 2017), but these had an additional edge that illuminated a major risk factor that would threaten the safety of local residents, Games participants, and spectators—military or cyber conflict involving North Korea. For example, a syndicated story in the Australian Financial Review stated:

South Korea has protected athletes and spectators at previous events, but North Korea’s track record is a worry. The year before the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, agents from Pyongyang bombed a Korean Air flight, killing all 115 passengers and crew. In 2002, when South Korea was hosting the soccer World Cup, North Korean patrol boats crossed into disputed waters, sparking a naval clash that sunk one South Korean ship and claimed the lives of six sailors.

With its growing technical sophistication, North Korea doesn’t have to rely on its military to disrupt the Games. This time it could easily launch a cyberattack…

Amid all the fears, the UK is reportedly drawing up evacuation plans for its team in case tensions escalate while other nations have expressed reservations about sending athletes. (Lee, 2017)

It became, therefore, very hard for South Korea to gain the kind of positive “clear air” publicity that all sport mega-events seek—in this case, making a claim for the country as a new, sophisticated destination for professional and recreational winter sports. Instead, the evolving image of the Games foregrounded peninsular conflict and great power rivalries, with the United States, China, and Russia all directly implicated alongside the two Koreas and Japan. These considerations maintained their centrality as thousands of journalists entered South Korea immediately before the Games, generating the usual spatial and thematic “colour” stories that set the scene for the athletic action to come (e.g., Robinson, 2018; The Sydney Morning Herald, 2018a).

It is very difficult for hosts to shift the event’s dominant narrative, especially one that is negative or, from the point of view of those who stage it, skewed in undesirable ways. A prominent example is the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which struggled to gain positive media coverage after early logistical problems (including transport of, and support for, international journalists), excessive commercialism, and a bombing in a local park (Hill, 1996). Media management strategies seek to shape event narratives to positive effect, but the communicative environment is bewilderingly complex and unpredictable. The variable experiences and interests of a small number of agents, especially of the most powerful Anglophone media corporations, can set the tone for a Games that, through replication and circulation among their vast, influential audiences, overwhelms competing narratives from hosts and other involved parties.

The attendant uncertainties in interpreting and projecting the meaning of the mega-event emphasize the nature of risk (Rowe, 2011) within a field of competing agents and dispositions. What is remarkable about PyeongChang 2018 is that its biggest threat and potential weakness became its greatest strength. From the moment that North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un made positive overtures in a New Year’s Day address about his country’s participation in the Games, the narrative shifted and PyeongChang 2018 became the centre of global media news discourse. This offer was made in a climate of conciliation fostered by South Korean President Moon Jae-in (Harris, 2018), including direct invitations to participate in the Games. The involvement of the North, and the meetings between the countries’ representatives that preceded the Games, did not only soothe concerns that the Olympics might be subjected to military attack but also enabled it to become a key focus of the sport diplomacy that held out some hope if not, improbably, of peace and even unification, then at least of an easing of the tensions that had led many to fear that nuclear or conventional warfare on the Korean peninsula and beyond (even, perhaps, reaching the United States and Australia) was imminent (Rowe & Lee, 2018). Sport’s relationship to diplomacy was particularly prominent here because it is a domain of international public culture that is often evoked as being “above” politics, especially when related to the Olympic charter and its second fundamental principle of Olympism:

2. The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. (IOC, 2015)

At such moments, sporting considerations can become almost incidental in deference to globally significant political calculations. Sport, and notably the Olympics, could be praised for facilitating a provisional political reconciliation—ironically, an officially sanctioned repudiation of the shibboleth that sport and politics don’t and shouldn’t mix (see, for example, International Olympic Committee [IOC] President Thomas Bach’s unashamedly political celebration of the organization’s role in the Korean peninsula under the guise of political neutrality; Bucher, 2018). The principal media focus relating to the sport itself was on the involvement of North Korea—the size of the delegation, heavily symbolic arrangements at the opening ceremony, appearance of the North’s cheer leaders, and, crucially, the refashioning of the South Korean women’s ice hockey team to accommodate players from the North in creating a unified team (Australian Broadcasting Corporation [ABC], 2018a). Sporting purists and many (including younger) fans (Reid & Hong, 2018), South Korean nationalists, and those with a deep opposition to the North found this arrangement undesirable, but media coverage was generally favourable—the loss of one (notably, in terms of the politics of gender, a women’s) team’s chances of success was regarded in diplomatic terms as a price worth paying, especially given the expectation that the South Korean team would not, in any case, be likely to win a medal. Awkward pre-Games moments, like the failure of a joint cultural performance across the northern border—ironically blamed by the North on South Korean media hostility—were generally downplayed (Pasha-Robinson, 2018).

International media became almost transfixed by the politics in and of the Games. Certainly, they did not forget the sport altogether, especially in the events where compatriots had real chances of winning a medal. It might almost be suggested that there was an inverse relationship between the extent and depth of the coverage of the sport and the sporting credentials of individual nations. However, even those nations likely to win many medals carried a great deal of political coverage of Korea in their news, sport, and general media (gauged, it should be admitted, by rudimentary Internet searches and translations by the author). In other words, the politics did not displace the sport entirely but enhanced the overall media attention to the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games. For some of the “lesser” competing countries in sporting terms, the games probably received more coverage precisely because of their geopolitical significance. To put it another way, there are 206 National Olympic Committees in the IOC (more than the United Nations, which consists of 193 sovereign states and two nonmember observer states), of which, as noted, 92 (including Olympic athletes from Russia) participated in the 2018 Winter Olympics and a record 49 (including the neutral delegation) at the Paralympics. Of these nations, 32 won a medal at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics (28 in the Paralympics), with South Korea the only country among the top 10 medal winners that was not from continental Europe or North America (coming 7th in the Olympics and joint 16th in the Paralympics). By contrast, Australasia (through Australia and New Zealand) won five medals, as did Great Britain. While it would be necessary to do a large multinational, multilingual content analysis to be precise about media coverage of the 2018 Games, it is probably safe to propose that, globally, it far exceeded that of Turin 2006 and Vancouver 2010 but was closer to that of Sochi 2014 in most countries. The explanation of this variation is obvious—Sochi 2014 and PyeongChang 2018 were political “hot spots” that sparked attention from media and their audiences across the world with little or no interest in, or knowledge of, winter sport. At the same time, the nonsports news media in countries with a greater interest in winter sport were drawn toward the political alongside the more overtly sporting spectacle.

Condensed Event in Play

As the event qua sport gained momentum, media attention switched freely between sporting and political action. Ideally from a news perspective, they could be combined in some way by having political stories take shape in sporting venues. The North Korean cheer squad’s actions at and outside Olympic venues were newsworthy in providing a glimpse of the choreographed moves and almost identical appearance of the young women involved, who could be shown in performance as recognisable national sport fans (especially, as noted, at the women’s ice hockey), irrespective of the operative geopolitical complexities. However, the most newsworthy images were generated at the opening ceremony. The march of the two Koreas under a common flag provided “light,” but the studied refusal of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence to acknowledge the close proximity of Kim Jong-Un’s sister and North Korean senior representative, Kim Yo-Jong, provided the “shade” that attends highly visual political drama. Such a fixation on the “optics” of the encounter and its deeper resonance reflects in a complex way on the Olympic location in which it took place. Hosts provide the setting but cannot be held responsible, strictly, for the actions of the international attendees. There was concern among various members of the media that they and their Olympic hosts could be seen as complicit in the North’s “charm offensive,” a naivety that, more seriously, might also be regarded as an ethically questionable accommodation of a brutal regime (Sengupta, 2018). However, most of the coverage of the political developments was, on balance, positive—the situation was generally represented as less-than-ideal, but the “thawing” of relations and promise of negotiations were seen as far preferable to the unthinkable—military—and worse still, nuclear—conflict. Thus, the in(actions) of Pence and denial of an opportunity to advance contact with the North tended to be viewed negatively, especially by journalists working for media outlets that were typically critical of the United States’ Trump regime (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2018b). PyeongChang 2018 was, in this context, largely “exonerated” of the political crime of operating as a vehicle for the advancement of a malign or ethically dubious interest, and the United States mainly regarded as negative and obstructionist (despite later claims that Pence’s earlier overtures to arrange a meeting with North Korean representatives at the Olympics had been rebuffed—BBC, 2018c).

Following the conventional pattern of coverage during major sports events, as the Games unfolded there was greater media emphasis on the sport because it supplied action, commentary, results, analysis, national focus, and medal ceremonies. The political discussion of the North Korean situation receded somewhat, although part of this space was filled with further coverage of Russia and doping involving new detections during the Games (BBC, 2018d). Also, as usual there were “quirky” or less predictable stories that broke through the routine coverage, including the bare-chested Tongan athlete who carried his country’s flag (Pleasance, 2018) and the slickly promoted stories concerning the Nigerian women’s bobsleigh team (all of whom lived in the United States; Adigun & Omeoga, 2018) and the Jamaican women’s bobsleigh team (Boon, 2018). Such stories ran alongside those concerning specific national teams, sports events, and results (Dickinson & Ziegler, 2018; Kelly, 2018), as well as continuing, though less intensive, coverage of geopolitics. By the time of the closing ceremony, there was a broadly favourable reflection on the Games, no doubt fuelled by some relief that there had been no violent incident, as had been feared at the height of tensions surrounding North Korea’s likely noninvolvement (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2018c). This reading of the Games was infused with optimism, both regarding the event (seen as a strategic and operational success and as a sign that, in moving next to Beijing after the summer Olympics had been held in Tokyo in 2020, the role of East Asia in the Olympic movement had been strengthened) and its influence beyond the sporting world (in potentially advancing regional and world peace). The generally positive reaction was not significantly affected by the more fractious Paralympics, at which political disagreements over a unified flag design caused the Koreas to march separately and with a much smaller delegation from the North including neither cheer leaders nor musicians (Ma, 2018; Spits, 2018). Nonetheless, that North Korea was involved at all was in general viewed favourably, given previous criticisms of its treatment of people with a disability (Haas, 2018). Despite suspicion over the North’s intentions, sport’s role as a tool of diplomacy was emphasised, although its overall efficacy remained in question (Huish, 2018).

Legacy and Conclusion: Tentative Historical Coda

While event hosts talk much about legacy, the attention span of the international media is limited in scope and depth. The sport specialist component tends to focus first on the performance of, and implications for, national teams and quickly shifts to the next international contest. For example, at the FIFA World Cup in Russia a few months after PyeongChang 2018, global media attention to the politics of the event was largely lost to a focus on the football as the tournament commenced (Ziegler, 2018). The media record and condense impressions of the main meanings of the event, which are then placed in the cultural memory bank, available to be consulted as history unfolds. Over time, these recollections and assessments tend to coalesce around a single, binary judgement—was the event, ultimately, a success or failure? This imprecise and often crude, selective reading of history constitutes the short, concentrated account that is habitually summoned by the media in looking back on a phenomenon that can never be neatly captured, filed, and stored. But this compression tends to be what occurs as the now-digital record is established in collective consciousness. Single dramatic moments can deeply influence this multi-authored, mediated memory (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, & Levy, 2011), as can more diffuse, media-influenced positive and negative impressions. Hence, as already noted regarding the summer Olympics since the 1970s, there are frequent, though highly contestable, shorthand associations of Munich 1972 with terrorism; Montreal 1976 with debt; Seoul 1988 with sprinter Ben Johnson’s doping (to the extent that almost 30 years later, he participated in advertisements for an online sport betting company making fun of his own misdemeanour—Harris, 2017); Barcelona 1992, Sydney 2000, and London 2012 with a “feel good factor”; Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 with boycotts; Los Angeles 1984 and Atlanta 1996 with unashamed commercialization; Athens 2004 and Rio 2016 with poverty and inequality; Beijing 2008 with grandiose scale and human rights protests; and so on. Each of these summary, immediate recollections is no more than a crude distillation of complex events that resonate beyond the contest for medals over which different groups and interests compete for interpretive influence (Rowe, 2004). But they are powerful rhetorical weapons. What, then, will be the most potent media-guided narrative encapsulation of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games?

In the brief period since the Games ended, there seems to be little doubt that PyeongChang 2018 will be remembered mainly for its key intervention in the relationship between North Korea and the rest of the world. After the Winter Olympics concluded, IOC President Bach travelled to North Korea to meet Kim Jong-Un in Pyongyang, holding formal talks with him and the National Olympic Committee concerning North Korea’s participation in future Summer and Winter Olympics (as noted, the next two are located in East Asia) and the youth Olympic Games, then watching a football match together (SBS, 2018). After a delegation from the South met Kim Jong-un in the North (between the end of the Winter Olympics and the commencement of the Paralympics), an agreement was made to hold a Summit with President Moon Jae-in, which occurred in April, and provided globally circulated images of the two leaders shaking hands across the border before walking and talking in the South (Killalea, 2018). Soon after, U.S. President Donald Trump agreed, to the surprise of his own staff, to meet Kim Jong-un within a very short time frame. He then cancelled the meeting in response to a hostile outburst from the North, which then took a conciliatory approach and the summit was held in Singapore, under intense global media scrutiny, with the leaders meeting on June 11 and signing a vaguely worded denuclearization agreement on the following day (ABC, 2018b; Fernando, 2018). Given that there had never been a meeting between the leaders of these two countries, which had fought a bloody war in the middle of the last century and have been in conflict ever since, this was an extraordinary turn of events in which sport had played a much-remarked role. However, the media focus on the telegenic, newsworthy staged encounter between two easily caricatured protagonists meant that the essential, low-key and unglamorous preparatory work of President Moon Jae-in was underplayed, although the Winter Olympics was often mentioned as a catalyst.

There followed further progress in North and South Korean relations, including meetings over military deescalation and limited cross-border family reunion. In sport, at the World Team Table Tennis Championships in Sweden in May, instead of playing each other in the quarter finals, the two Korean teams were allowed to combine (Mail Online, 2018). Agreement was reached to field combined teams in canoeing, rowing, and women’s basketball at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and Palembang, Indonesia, at which the Koreas would march together at the opening and closing ceremonies under a common flag and anthem. Men’s, women’s, and mixed inter-Korean basketball “friendlies” took place during talks in Pyongyang (New Zealand Herald, 2018; The Mainichi, 2018). Again, though, in July there were tensions between North Korea and the United States, with the former accusing the latter of a “gangster-like mind-set” over denuclearization (Sampathkumar, 2018a). This position contrasted with US descriptions of positive progress in the talks and the text of a July 6 letter from Kim released via Twitter by Trump declaring “epochal progress.” At the same time, the United States “accused North Korea of violating a UN sanctions cap on refined oil products,” and North Korean officials did not turn up at an arranged meeting with the United States and United Nations at the truce village of Panmunjom to discuss “the repatriation of the remains of American soldiers killed in the 1950-53 Korean war” (BBC, 2018e). A bare 6 months after the Games and only 2 months after the Trump–Kim Singapore meeting, the US President instructed his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to cancel a visit to North Korea, “citing a lack of progress on denuclearisation” (Shugerman, 2018). By October 2018, a repeat Trump-Kim meeting was again being signalled. Despite the diplomatic outcomes being profoundly uncertain, PyeongChang 2018 remains a notable point of reference in media descriptions of the dynamics of Korean and world politics and, especially, of providing the impetus for negotiation and cooperation between the Koreas and other interested parties. Typical accounts referred to the event delivering “an unexpected geopolitical dividend” (Hammond, 2018), at which “[t]ensions seemed to abate” (Sampathkumar, 2018b), so that “February’s Winter Olympics in South Korea were a turning point” (Tisdall, 2018). Nonetheless, the specific geopolitical and sociological environment of the Korean peninsula demands the kind of historically informed, in-depth accounts that neither the media nor the nonspecialist (such as the author) can be relied upon to provide, not least in the field of sport itself (Kwak, Ko, Kang, & Rosentraub, 2017).

It can, then, be proposed that the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics have been widely credited in the media in various regions, including Western Europe and Australasia, with being the catalyst or “icebreaker” in relation to these developments. This general position still holds as the immediacy and energy that attend live sport events inevitably subside. Long after memories of the athletic performances have faded—especially for those audiences largely unfamiliar with winter sports whose attention was drawn mainly by excitement, spectacle, sporting nationalism, and blanket political coverage—a kind of mediated consensus is likely to be established in various national contexts. Of course, this representational pattern does not entail uniformity—differential positions in relation to the Korean peninsula, the region, sport, and so on, will produce a range of disparate social and psychological orientations to PyeongChang 2018, just as they have in other Games (de Moragas Spà, Rivenburgh, & Larson, 1995). Also, the institutional media themselves, and the social media with which they both converge and diverge, have a variety of positions concerning the state of the social, political, and sporting worlds.

But, just as opening and closing ceremonies create cameos of national culture that can be infuriating yet familiar in working with symbolic material that is banal in the sense of being easily circulated and absorbed (Billig, 1995), so the media memory of sport mega-events is influential because of its availability, density, and professional capacity to encapsulate them within an easily tapped image repository of images and emotions. But, this narrativization does not mean that such meaning-laden memories are immutable and immobile. The unfolding of history, not least in real time (Dayan & Katz, 1992), can lead to major revisions of mediated mythologies. Therefore, just as the capacity of hosts to control a preferred narrative is limited before and during the event itself, the emergent interpretive orthodoxy can be destabilized by subsequent developments. If PyeongChang 2018 is largely remembered in various parts of the world for its involvement with issues of regional and world peace, then its historical reputation is susceptible to geopolitical shifts that might, if political progress is frustrated or worse, see its role in politics and diplomacy recast as futile, misguided, naive, or even deluded. This making of history is, then, inevitably subject to the uncertainties that are inherent in human society, with the media being adept at revisionism and at dispensing rear-vision wisdom (Nicholas, O’Malley, & Williams, 2008). Such caveats put into perspective the pretentious over-reach of many Olympic and other mega-event marketing campaigns that, in “making history,” they are also in control of their destiny.

But excessive pessimism or passivity should also be avoided. It is reliably contended that, some three decades ago, the coming of parliamentary democracy to South Korea was accelerated—though certainly not caused—by the global political pressures that attended hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics (Kwak, 2012). South Korea’s politics are still troubled, but hosting the Olympics, and later with Japan, a country with which it has a long, tragic history, the 2002 FIFA World Cup, has provided some evidence that sport can be a progressive force. The “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, 2004) operates as a remorseless engine for making and unmaking myths about sport and society. If PyeongChang 2018 is remembered as helping to break the political impasse surrounding the Korean peninsula in a positive, sustained way, then that will be a very favourable legacy of sport diplomacy—but it is one that will be decided well beyond the Olympic stadium. Indeed, in this instance, the metaphor of launching inexorably into geopolitical space via the ski jump ramp, and the uncertainties of the landing and the result, is peculiarly appropriate.