PYEONGCHANG (South Korea) • Ms Lee Ji Seol was in elementary school when her home town, Pyeongchang, first applied to host the Winter Olympics. During a visit by Olympic officials, she recalled, her entire class lined up on a street to cheer and wave flags.
Their enthusiasm notwithstanding, the bid hardly seemed promising. Located 80km from North Korea and the world's most heavily fortified border, Pyeongchang was known as a mountain backwater that produced potatoes and cattle.
The town centre was a nondescript crossroads, going to seed with "love motels" and karaoke bars. The area had two ski resorts, but they struggled to muster enough snow to attract visitors.
That first bid for the 2010 Games failed, as did a second bid to host in 2014, but the International Olympic Committee finally gave Pyeongchang, population 43,000, the nod for the 2018 Winter Games, which will open this week.
"The entire town was out dancing," Ms Lee, now 22, said of the day they heard the news.
It is one of the poorest places in Gangwon, South Korea's most isolated and least developed province, which shares a long border with the North. And though it is just 129km from Seoul, getting to Pyeongchang from the capital used to take hours on mountain roads that twist like "a sheep's intestines", as the locals say.
Provincial Governor Choi Moon Soon called it "the last place the government thought of when it thought of investment", adding "we hoped an Olympics would change that".
The nation's leaders were eager to build global prestige and saw the Winter Games as a chance to become one of only a handful of countries that have hosted a "trifecta" of international sports events - the football World Cup took place in South Korea and Japan in 2002, and Seoul hosted the Summer Games in 1988.
The government has poured US$13 billion (S$17.2 billion) into the region, building a new bullet train and highway - and 97 tunnels and 78 bridges - to improve access to Pyeongchang from Seoul, as well as sporting facilities such as ice rinks and ski slopes.
Many believe the area's future lies in bolstering tourism and are hopeful the Winter Games will help. The service sector accounts for 70 per cent of the local economy, in part because vacationers are drawn to the province's scenic coast.
In lobbying for its bid, South Korea used a potential handicap - Pyeongchang's proximity to the North Korean border, in a region bristling with troops and weaponry - as a selling point. Holding the Games in Pyeongchang, officials argued, would promote peace between two nations still technically at war. The North did agree to send 22 athletes to the Games, and the two countries agreed to field a joint women's ice hockey team.
Pyongyang's ceremonial head of state Kim Yong Nam will also visit the South from Friday to Sunday this week for the Winter Olympics, Seoul said late yesterday.
A third of South Korea's 600,000 military personnel is based in Gangwon province. Many posted here as conscripts - all men in South Korea are required to serve about two years in the military - say they never want to see it again, so rugged are its hills and cold its winters.
Suspicion of North Korea is deeply etched here. The mountainous border is scarred with barbed wire, tank traps, land mines and guard posts. Hilltop loudspeakers blare K-pop songs daily towards the North, which counters by sending propaganda leaflets floating on balloons into the South.
Dreams of easing tensions and reunifying with the North one day are also more acutely felt here than anywhere else in South Korea. Many older people in the area came from the North as war refugees, settling near the border in the hope of returning quickly once the Koreas were reunified.
But Mr Choi shrugs off such concerns. "Those of us who live here are not afraid of North Korea because the North, despite all its missile tests and bombast, doesn't have an ability to fight a war," he said.
"The happiest thing about the Olympics is that when foreigners see the Games taking place here, we can shake off our stigma as a dangerous place."
NYTIMES, REUTERS
