Paris 2024 Olympics: North Korea performs diplomatic gymnastics

The North’s participation in these Games signalled a “remarkable” return to the international fold, suggested Jean H Lee, a former Associated Press journalist who opened the US news agency’s first bureau in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

It did not send any athletes to the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, after the country shut itself off from the world even more sternly than usual due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

But in Paris, it was “making the effort to rejoin the international community”, Lee said, “regardless of what’s happening with their nuclear programme, which is always the elephant in the room”.

The North’s nuclear ambitions are an enduring cause of tension with the South and the US. But there was no sign of animosity between the three nations’ gymnasts on Saturday.

This new generation of North Korean athletes have claimed two silvers in Paris, and occasionally surprised sport commentators who did not know what to expect from them.

Winning medals was not the country’s only aim, according to Prof Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King’s College London, who has written extensively on the two Koreas.

The age-old North Korean art of “sports diplomacy” involved limited participation in a global forum to prove the country was normal, Prod Pacheco Pardo said. Athletes were some of the “few actors that North Korea has who won’t be viewed suspiciously” by the world, he explained.