Olympics: South Korea has co-hosting dream with North

South Korea's second-largest city, Pusan, wants to co-host the Summer Olympics in 2020 with the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, the southern city's mayor said today.

The South Korean capital, Seoul, staged the Summer Games in 1988 but Pyongyang's last-ditch attempt to co-host some of the events came to nothing and North Korea eventually boycotted those Olympics.

But senior sports officials from the two countries agreed on November 1 to compete as a single team for the first time at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha and then at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing -- a move with huge political as well as sporting significance.

Although still far from smooth, relations across the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone frontier have improved considerably since the Seoul Games.

"In principle, as the mayor, I have a passion and the opinion to co-host, North and South, the Summer Olympics in 2020," Pusan mayor Hur Nam-sik told a news conference through an interpreter.

"But this has to be on the condition there is progress in North-South Korean relations," he said.

He had yet to discuss the idea with the North, he added.

Hur said he would set up a Pusan bid committee soon, adding that he had timed his announcement to coincide with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum his city is hosting this week.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) would decide on the hosts for the 2020 Games in eight years from now, he said.

An Asian city is likely to win the bid and Hur said Pusan had the necessary experience and some venues already built. A bid has to be submitted to the National Olympic Committee by 2009.

Pusan hosted the Asian Games in 2002, just months after staging some of the soccer World Cup matches.

Back in 1988, the Olympic yachting events were held off Pusan, a port city of some 3.7 million people on the southern tip of the peninsula.

Despite marching together at various opening ceremonies, North and South Koreans have competed as a single team only in an aborted experiment in soccer and table tennis in the early 1990s.

The countries have never co-hosted a major sports event, and a two-country Olympics straddling the Demilitarised Zone would need careful planning if it was ever to get off the ground.

Last week, Hur said that the Apec event would create jobs and improve "brand recognition" for Pusan, which nestles in mountains around sea inlets.

"What is important is that I want to make the Apec summit the basis for the future development of Pusan," he said.

"This summit will help introduce Pusan to the world."

A South Korean city, Pyeongchang, narrowly lost out to Canada's Vancouver to host the 2010 Winter Olympics. Pyeongchang's bid committee said in September the North backed the city's repeat bid to host the 2014 Games.

It was not immediately clear how that bid would affect Pusan's aspirations to co-host the Summer Games six years later.

- REUTERS