North Korea may punish table tennis medal winners for taking selfie & smiling with South Korea athletes

A pair of North Korean table tennis athletes might face censure for a selfie they took with their South Korean counterparts.

On Jul. 31, China, North Korea, and South Korea received their medals for Olympic mixed doubles table tennis.

After the ceremony, the six athletes made use of a sponsored Samsung initiative to take a selfie together, a rare moment of positive interaction between the three North East Asian neighbours.

Comprehensive ideological review

On Aug. 21, the Daily NK, a South Korean news outlet focused on North Korean news, reported that all North Korean athletes who had participated in the 2024 Paris Olympics were undergoing a "comprehensive ideological review" since they returned on Aug. 15.

Allkpop, a Korean culture gossip blog, translated Daily NK's report, saying that North Korean athletes  returning from international competition typically underwent a month-long, three-stage "ideological review process".

This included assessments by the North Korean Central Communist Party, the Ministry of Sports, as well as their own sporting organisations.

The purpose of the review was supposedly to assess the level of "contamination" for athletes exposed to "non-socialist cultures".

Reported for smiling

Daily NK reported that the two table tennis athletes who participated in the selfie, Ri Jong Sik and Kim Kum Yong, had been "negatively evaluated" due to the selfies at the medal ceremony.

But oddly the Daily NK's reports appears to suggest that it was not just the selfie, but the fact that both had smiled when standing next to the South Korean athletes.

Kim was also reported for smiling during the selfie, while Ri reportedly "stared at other athletes for a long time", as well as smiling when descending the podium.

Allkpop also reports that Kim Mi Rae, who won bronze at 10m platform diving, was also seen taking selfies with other athletes.

But in her case, she took selfies with athletes from China, while also avoiding using the Samsung phone, a South Korean device, to take the selfie herself.

This was suggested as an attempt to comply with a North Korean directive for athletes to distance themselves from South Korea.

Principal enemy

It also came as the two Koreas were in the midst of a balloon cargo scrap, South Korea sending propaganda northwards using balloons, and North Korea responding by sending back human waste.

North Korea declared the South as its "principal enemy" in January 2024.

So the selfies were seen as a bit of a sporting diplomatic coup, a symbol of how the Olympics brought people together, regardless of international conflict.

YouTube channel Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an advocacy group for North Koreans who have defected, released a video on the subject on Aug. 10.

North Korean athletes, LiNK said, are usually trained on how to interact with their international peers, especially those from South Korea.

LiNK said that the athletes would generally "be OK" if they kept within their guidelines, and that while selfies were a relatively new phenomenon, they were common enough that it was possible the athletes had been pre-briefed on acceptable behaviour.

LiNK’s video was published far in advance of Daily NK’s article, but might indicate why the "offences" cited in the article refer to actions during the selfie session, but not the selfie itself.

Other selfie occasions

This was not the first Olympic selfie between North and South. In 2016, North Korean Hong Un Jong took a selfie with South Korean Lee Eun Ju.

At the time, the BBC shared speculation that Hong would "face the firing squad" or hard labour, but said that Hong had continued to compete despite being pictured hugging United States gymnastics champion Simone Biles several years earlier.

Hong did not face censure at the time.

It is unclear whether Kim and Ri will face punishment this time, or whether this report is simply part of North Korea's process for sporting returnees.

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Top image via @tongbingxue/X