Part 1: Protest
There appears to be a new Olympic tradition, in which the host country impeaches its president months before hosting the Games. It happened to Dilma Rousseff of Brazil shortly before Rio, while Park Geun-hye of South Korea was removed in March 2017.
But even with this failure of leadership, South Korea has come a long way in the last 35 years. Park’s democratic credentials were still far better than those of Chun Doo-hwan (above), a general who took power in a military coup in 1979. His presidency was not subject to constitutional oversight, and could only be challenged by the bravery of the South Korean people, who went onto the streets in 1987 to protest his dictatorial rule.
In doing so, they honoured another Olympic tradition. There had been a similar protest by Mexican students before Mexico City held the 1968 Games, which the government met with violent reprisals. Dozens were killed and there were more than 1,000 arrests.
If this precedent created a sense of foreboding about the June Struggle, as the protest of 1987 became known, the events of seven years earlier made it even more ominous. After an anti-coup protest in 1980 (below), Chun had ordered troops to be dispatched and, when they inevitably fired on civilians, it resulted in a massacre killing hundreds.
The International Olympic Committee awarded the 1988 Games to Seoul at its 1981 Baden-Baden Congress. This was after Chun’s coup and the massacre which followed it, a decision which now seems astonishing. It is unclear why the IOC snubbed the more credible candidacy of Nagoya in Japan, but it seems in part to be because Nagoya made the same mistake as many a failed bid, before and since, of believing it had already won.
After a decade of financial calamities and political boycotts, and a terrorist attack, the Olympic Movement was arguably at the most precarious point in its history. Yet, newly led by the charismatic but single-minded Juan Antonio Samaranch, it chose to take a punt on a country which seemed to be on the brink of disaster, with little thought of the risk to itself, and with an even more callous disregard for the risk to South Korean lives.
By June 1987, many of the assorted noblemen and bureaucrats of the IOC must surely have regretted their decision. Their best hope was that Chun would show mercy but, as the world of sport would have taught them, form is the best guide to future results, and they knew that Chun’s form was to hold onto power at the expense of moral concerns.
If Samaranch, the smooth-talking diplomat, thought that he could charm his way out of this one, he was about to face his biggest test, certainly the one with the most at stake.
Next: An unusual sport makes an unusually good case for geographic genetic patterns
Team World 