{"id":14891,"date":"2018-02-21T17:50:12","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T03:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=14891"},"modified":"2018-02-21T17:53:27","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T03:53:27","slug":"wash-post-south-koreas-naturalized-athletes-in-the-pyeongchang-olympics-beyond-treated-as-mercenaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=14891","title":{"rendered":"Wash Post: South Korea\u2019s naturalized athletes in the PyeongChang Olympics; beyond treated as mercenaries?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi Blog. While the PyeongChang Olympics are still going on, let’s talk about how national borders are being broken down in the name of enhancing national sporting prowess.<\/p>\n

As per the Washington Post article below, South Korea has been converting foreigners into Korean Olympic athletes with the stroke of the bureaucratic pen. \u00a0Thus it is unclear at this point how much of a dent they will make on the national self-image of what it means “to be a Korean”. \u00a0If they don’t win (which, sadly, they won’t), then it’s doubtful they will be anything more than an unsuccessful means to an end, an asterisk in the annals of Korean sports.<\/p>\n

But if they are accepted nevertheless as “true Koreans” (as opposed to mercenaries; and there is a positive precedent with naturalized citizen Lee Charm\/Bernhard Quandt becoming South Korea’s National Tourism Organization leader in 2009<\/a>; until, ahem, he stepped down in 2013 due to a sex scandal<\/a>), Debito.org will be among the first to cheer. \u00a0Especially since South Korea, unlike Japan, allows for some form of dual nationality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, Japan too<\/a> has made “instant Japanese<\/a>” for the purpose of strengthening Japan’s international sports showings, and the fielding of athletes of international roots<\/a> who didn’t make teams overseas. \u00a0And there have<\/a> been some wins<\/a> on their part. \u00a0But the outlook is not good: \u00a0Beyond someone like the (legendary but nasty<\/a>) baseball player Oh Sadaharu, and some famous Sumo wrestlers<\/a> (who nowadays aren’t even officially counted as “Japanese” anyway<\/a>), who remembers them? \u00a0Dr. Debito Arudou<\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

Can you sing the anthem? Okay, you can play hockey for South Korea<\/strong>
\n By Chico Harlan, The Washington Post, February 11, 2018<\/strong>
\nhttps:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/sports\/olympics\/can-you-sing-the-anthem-okay-you-can-play-hockey-for-south-korea\/2018\/02\/11\/fe63fa36-0ef6-11e8-8b0d-891602206fb7_story.html<\/a><\/p>\n

PHOTO CAPTION: Seven of the South Korean men\u2019s hockey team members are foreign-born, including six from Canada.<\/strong><\/p>\n

GANGNEUNG, South Korea<\/strong> \u2014 Not long after South Korea was chosen to host these Winter Olympics, as officials spoke openly about setting new medal records and showing off the country\u2019s growing winter sports prowess to the world, a humbling reality set in:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

South Korea was going to have to field a men\u2019s ice hockey team.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

At that point, the country\u2019s all-time Winter Olympic hockey record was 0-0. Its national team was ranked neck-and-neck with North Korea. The country had a nonexistent hockey tradition, a thin pool of talent and just a few years to draw up a plan that would save itself from embarrassment.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Player by player, the results of that plan stepped Sunday night onto the ice, where the team\u2019s latest practice kicked off with a goalie skating out from the locker room, wristing a puck at an angle and saying, in English, \u201cThese boards are bouncy.\u201d Soon the whole team was on the ice, circling and taking slap shots, and somebody yelled, \u201cWhooo, nice one.\u201d Finally the coach settled at center ice, calling everybody toward the red line to take a knee. Every word of his was in English. \u201cBring it in, bring it in,\u201d he said.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In a bid to upgrade its hockey program in fast-forward, one of the world\u2019s most homogenous countries has created one of the most foreign-heavy Olympic teams of all time. Among 25 players on the South Korean men\u2019s hockey team<\/a> in PyeongChang, seven were born in other countries, including six in Canada<\/a>. South Korea has 19 foreign-born athletes competing for it in these Olympics, most of any country, with hockey accounting for the largest share.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The men, so far, have gotten far less attention than their South Korean female hockey counterparts. The men, unlike the women, have no eye-catching diplomatic narrative. They don\u2019t share a roster with any North Koreans. They won\u2019t draw synchronized cheerleaders to their games. Instead, they prepare in near-empty arenas \u2014 and draw only three or four media members to their practices.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The imported men\u2019s players are less mercenaries than converts, granted naturalized Korean citizenship even though they have no Korean blood. To get that opportunity, they had to play at least two seasons for Korean clubs in a pan-Asian hockey league. And then meet with national hockey officials. And then national Olympic officials. And then the country\u2019s Ministry of Justice.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, and then they had to take a test and sing the national anthem.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThen, you find out if you pass or not,\u201d said Eric Regan, a defenseman from Ontario, who naturalized in 2016. \u201cI was with Matt Dalton, the goalie, at the time. We went through the process together and we both passed along with, I think, two other biathletes that day \u2014 both Russians. A month later we\u2019re playing in the world championships for Team Korea. It was wild.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The plan to boost South Korea\u2019s competence began in 2014, with the hiring of a coach. The coach was Jim Paek, the first Korean-born player to make the National Hockey League. He had won a Stanley Cup championship in the early 1990s with the Pittsburgh Penguins, skating alongside Mario Lemieux. Several months after his hiring, the International Ice Hockey Federation announced that South Korea \u2014 having shown enough commitment to its program \u2014 would get an automatic bid, becoming one of 12 teams in the Olympic tournament. Traditionally, host countries receive automatic bids.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

To hear Paek tell it, the national team recruited foreigners not from all over the world but rather from its own doorstep, targeting foreigners already playing in South Korea. For years, a handful of borderline NHL prospects had landed in the Asia League, a 15-year-old hockey league that spans four countries and has had 15 teams \u2014 seven of which have dissolved. Teams in Korea attract players by offering modest perks: a car, a tax-free salary, an apartment with heated floors. \u201cI literally live in a building called Samsung,\u201d said Mike Testwuide, a U.S.-born player on the Korean team.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It was these players that Paek began to recruit.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A few were already naturalized citizens. Others, Paek pitched on the idea.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

He told them the Olympics were coming up, and that they could help.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t hesitate, really,\u201d Testwuide said. \u201cIt\u2019s about showing that Korea has a serious hockey program.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Paek said scouting players for his national team was relatively easy. The talent pool was so thin that it didn\u2019t take much time.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s lucky or not,\u201d he said.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

At least two of Korea\u2019s current players, Bryan William Young and Alex Plante, have logged a couple of shifts in the NHL. The goalie, Dalton, dressed for a few games as a Boston Bruins backup. The player who has spent the most time in Korea, Brock Radunske, has played more than 350 games in the Asia League \u2014 and stands at 6-foot-5, nicknamed the Canadian Big Beauty.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The team begins play Thursday and is matched in a group with Canada, Switzerland and the Czech Republic \u2014 countries with a combined 27 medals in men\u2019s hockey. South Korea\u2019s Yonhap news agency wrote recently that a \u201cwinless performance isn\u2019t entirely out of the question.\u201d But Paek disagreed.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe work really hard, and our expectation is, we\u2019re prepared to win a game,\u201d he said. \u201cTo win every game we play.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>
\nENDS<\/p>\n

============================<\/p>\n

Do you like what you read on Debito.org? \u00a0Want to help keep the archive active and support Debito.org’s activities? \u00a0Please consider donating a little something. \u00a0More details here<\/a>. Or even click on an ad below.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WaPo: In a bid to upgrade its hockey program in fast-forward, one of the world\u2019s most homogenous countries has created one of the most foreign-heavy Olympic teams of all time. Among 25 players on the South Korean men\u2019s hockey team in PyeongChang, seven were born in other countries, including six in Canada. South Korea has 19 foreign-born athletes competing for it in these Olympics, most of any country, with hockey accounting for the largest share. […] The imported men\u2019s players are less mercenaries than converts, granted naturalized Korean citizenship even though they have no Korean blood. To get that opportunity, they had to play at least two seasons for Korean clubs in a pan-Asian hockey league. And then meet with national hockey officials. And then national Olympic officials. And then the country\u2019s Ministry of Justice.<\/p>\n

Oh, and then they had to take a test and sing the national anthem. \u201cThen, you find out if you pass or not,\u201d said Eric Regan, a defenseman from Ontario, who naturalized in 2016. \u201cI was with Matt Dalton, the goalie, at the time. We went through the process together and we both passed along with, I think, two other biathletes that day \u2014 both Russians. A month later we\u2019re playing in the world championships for Team Korea. It was wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

COMMENT: Although breaking down blood-determined national borders in the name of sports participation is a positive development, it is unclear at this point how much of a dent these naturalized athletes will make on the national self-image of what it means “to be a Korean”. \u00a0If they don’t win (which, sadly, they won’t), then it’s doubtful they will be anything more than an unsuccessful means to an end, an asterisk in the annals of Korean sports. \u00a0<\/p>\n

But if they are accepted nevertheless as “true Koreans” (as opposed to mercenaries; and there is a positive precedent with naturalized citizen Lee Charm\/Bernhard Quandt becoming South Korea’s National Tourism Organization leader in 2009) Debito.org will be among the first to cheer. <\/p>\n

Japan too has made “instant Japanese” for the purpose of strengthening Japan’s international sports showings, and the fielding of athletes of international roots who didn’t make teams overseas. \u00a0And there have been some wins on their part. \u00a0But the outlook is not good: \u00a0Beyond someone like the (legendary but nasty) baseball player Oh Sadaharu, and some famous Sumo wrestlers (who nowadays aren’t even officially counted as “Japanese” anyway), who remembers them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,28,35,12,17,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-embedded-racism","category-anti-discrimination-templates","category-good-news","category-immigration-assimilation","category-sport","category-tangents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14899,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14891\/revisions\/14899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}