HONG KONG — North and South Korea agreed on Wednesday to have their athletes march together under one flag at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics next month and to field a joint women’s ice hockey team, the most dramatic gesture of reconciliation between the two nations in a decade.
Seoul has said in the past that it hoped such a move could contribute to a political thaw after years of high tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile tests.
The Games will begin on Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and the women’s ice-hockey squad will be the first combined Korean team for the Olympics, and the first unified team since their athletes played together for an international table-tennis championship and a youth soccer tournament in 1991.
The two countries’ delegations will march at the opening ceremony behind a “unified Korea” flag that shows an undivided Korean Peninsula, negotiators from both sides said in a joint news release after talks at the border village of Panmunjom. The North will send 230 supporters to the Games, and negotiators agreed that supporters of both Koreas would root together for athletes from both countries.
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The prospect of North and South Koreans cheering together could help President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who has been pushing for dialogue and reconciliation with the North, even as President Trump has threatened the North with “
fire and fury like the world has never seen” should it put the security of Americans and their allies at risk.
The two countries also agreed on Wednesday that their skiing teams would train together in the
Masikryong ski resort in North Korea. The resort, a showpiece project of the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was opened in 2013.
South Korean officials said on Wednesday that the North’s delegation would include at least 550 people, including about 150 to the Paralympic Games in March. But the joint news statement said that the final number would be determined in Switzerland on Saturday, when the International Olympic Committee is to bring together North and South Korean officials. The plan is for the North’s athletes to enter the South over a land border on Feb. 1.