Soccer: South Koreans keen to make most of world sporting spotlight

By COLIN DONALD in Seoul

Football, the old joke has it, is not a matter of life and death - it's more important than that.

For the South Korean co-hosts of the 2002 World Cup, promoting Korea matters far more than football. Dignity, restraint and concerns about future relations with rival Japan are not being allowed to stand in the way.

Friday's lavish opening ceremony at the Seoul Stadium showed South Korea as a nation with something to prove and clear ideas about its goals.

"Its impossible to overestimate the importance of the World Cup to Korea" says Chris Gotch, World Cup liaison officer at the British Embassy in Seoul.

"They're expecting a lot of it; to revitalise industry, promote foreign investment and tourism, and put Korea firmly on the map."

But not everyone shares the South Korean philosophy that mega-sporting events are part political showcase, part trade fair, a view nurtured amongst Koreans by the triumphant 1988 Seoul Olympics. Modern South Korea's glory days were launched by this national coming-out party after decades of military dictatorship.

The international divergence of views has already chalked up one protocol disaster. Lame duck President Kim Dae Jung, desperate to shore up his legacy, attempted to turn the event into a rolling summit of heads of state with himself at the centre. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was never likely to accept his invitation, but "DJ" was shown to have shot humiliatingly wide of the goal when most of the other invitees also refused. The VIPs who attended, like Germany's ceremonial President Johannes Rau, and Britain's Prince Andrew were unlikely to make headlines.

This leaves the 77-year-old Nobel Prize laureate President, whose rapprochement with Pyongyang is a fast-fading memory, pinning his hopes on the outside chance of a strong showing by the Korean squad. A distraction is needed from a series of demeaning scandals, some of them involving his family. All three of his sons have been subject to influence-peddling investigations and one of them faces prison for taking bribes.

"For a domestic audience, what matters is that the team advance into the second round, something they have never managed on five previous world cup visits," says Gotch. "If they do well, then the political effects of the feelgood factor will be hard to predict."

In the atmosphere of expectation, Chung Mong Joon, chairman of KAWOC, the Korean organising committee, has even been touted as a serious candidate in this December's presidential election.

Meanwhile, Kim has pleaded with the Opposition to forgo the traditional Korean political sport of exchanging spicy personal abuse during the next few weeks, claiming that it reduces the country's image in the eyes of foreign visitors, although South Korean politics are a closed book to almost all foreign football fans.

Likewise the Labour Minister has begged the country's militant and strike-prone unions to suspend industrial action, though the request has had mixed results. Unions representing tourism and resort industries reached a truce with the Government last week, but the Confederation of Trade Unions seems to see the World Cup as a factor working in their favour.

This weekend's opening games were the culmination of a tense long term campaign to bring the World Cup to South Korea, a dream tarnished by having to share the games with their neighbour and rival Japan. Seoul ploughed a staggering US$60 million into its bid to host the cup on its own, and regarded the decision to split the tournament for the first time as "insulting", a view shared in Tokyo.

The run up to the tournament has seen a series of often-petty spats with Japan over matters of billing, the most recent being a complaint by the South Korean Embassy in London over a TV channel's choice of the theme tune Un Bel Di (One Fine Day), from the opera Madam Butterfly.

"I do not think it is fair that ITV (Independent television) has chosen music that the viewers will associate very much with Japan," said Hyon Tak Hwang, the press and cultural counsellor in London.

"The World Cup is taking place in Korea also and I will be discussing the matter with ITV in the hope of persuading them to change to a more neutral choice of music."

As well as a platform for boasting about the latest refinements of South Korea as an IT powerhouse that leads the world in internet penetration, the Koreans are convinced that co-hosting the world's largest sporting event will have massive economic benefits for the still recovering economy.

Although this was presaged by a 7 per cent growth rate unveiled last week, the long-term benefits have been questioned by economists.

They are doubtful about the long term benefits of 10 state-of-the-art stadia. With a combined construction cost of around US$1 billion, they are more likely to generate heavy maintenance bills than future income.

nzherald.co.nz/fifaworldcup

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