Top Olympics official ‘deeply sorry’ for introducing South Korea as North Korea during opening ceremony

Paris CNN —

Olympics organizers have “deeply apologized” to South Korea over a “human error” that saw its 143 athletes wrongly introduced as North Korean at the opening ceremony.

The mishap occurred on Friday, when the South Korean athletes made their debut on a boat cruising down the River Seine. Both the French and English announcements falsely identified them as being from the “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.”

That’s the full name of North Korea. The official name of South Korea is the “Republic of Korea.”

The error is politically sensitive for the two Koreas, which are still technically at war. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, and no peace treaty has ever been signed.

On Sunday, Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), spoke with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on a call, according to a statement.

“In this telephone call, the IOC President apologized sincerely for the mistake in the audio broadcast of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 … in which the team of the National Olympic Committee of the Republic of Korea … was wrongly identified,” it said.

“The problem was identified as a human error, for which the IOC is deeply sorry,” it added.

The phone call followed a more immediate apology from the Olympics body, which was issued shortly after the blunder on its official Korean-language account on X.

At a press conference on Saturday, IOC spokesperson Mark Adams called the incident “clearly deeply regrettable” and that the body “apologize[d] wholeheartedly,” Reuters reported.

This photograph shows the Olympic rings displayed on the lighten up Eiffel Tower in Paris on July 24, 2024, ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.