Seoul ’88 / Randy Harvey : South Koreans Take Sports Very Seriously

As if playing on their home pitch isn’t enough incentive, South Korean soccer players will receive sedans from one of the country’s major automobile manufacturers, Daewoo, if they win enough games in the Summer Olympics.

In this case, enough doesn’t mean that they have to win a medal, or even reach the medal round. All it means is that they have to advance to the second round.

To do that, they have to win two of the three games against the other teams in their group. Of their first-round opponents, they are clearly superior only to the United States. But if they beat the United States and then upset one of the other two teams, the Soviet Union or Argentina, the Koreans will improve their team speed significantly by driving away in new cars.

Not so fast, however, that they won’t try to win at least one more game and reach the semifinals. If they do, the Korean Football Assn. has promised each player $14,000.

As that is four times the annual salary for an average South Korean, the soccer players would be considered wealthy except when compared to, say, the CEO of Hyundai, the corrupt brother of a former president or a track and field athlete who wins an Olympic medal.

The South Koreans will pay $138,000 to a track and field gold medalist, $69,000 to a silver medalist and $42,000 to a bronze medalist. A track and field athlete who doesn’t win a medal but finishes sixth or better will receive between $2,750 and $6,900.

Now, it’s not likely any South Korean track and field athletes will collect. They don’t figure to finish among the top six in any events. That is like telling a house painter that he will receive thousands of dollars if one of his works ends up in the Louvre.

But that is not the case in several other sports, in which officials also have offered bonuses for medal winners. One boxer said recently that he has been told that he will receive $700 a month for the rest of his life if he wins a gold medal. Of the six gold medals that the South Koreans have established as their goal, boxers are expected to win two. Medals also are anticipated in judo, wrestling, archery, table tennis and shooting.

There is no doubt that sports officials here will consider it money well spent. Since Seoul was awarded the Olympics in 1981, South Korea has worked toward achieving the same miracle athletically that it has economically. The country would like to produce athletes on the assembly line the same way it does cars, televisions and VCRs.

South Korea won six golds, six silvers and seven bronzes four years ago in Los Angeles, more medals than it had won in all previous Olympics combined since first entering as a separate country in 1948. Before that, Korean athletes competed for the country’s colonial master, Japan.

Upon returning from Los Angeles, Korean athletes were paraded through the streets of Seoul for a crowd estimated at 2 million. It didn’t receive any front-page or network news coverage in the United States, but that’s about 1,000 times more than the number of people who are on hand for the average anti-government demonstration.

Sports fans, however, didn’t really mobilize behind their athletes until 1986, when South Korea won 92 gold medals in Seoul’s Asian Games. That was only one less than won by the Chinese, but, more significantly to the Koreans, it was more than were won by the Japanese. The relationship between Japan and South Korea is improving, but the best you could say for the two countries not so long ago was that they got along better than Iran and Iraq.

“I know many people here who said that they were interested in the cultural affairs surrounding the Asian Games but that they couldn’t care less about the sports,” said John MacAloon, a University of Chicago anthropologist who has been working on a project in South Korea. “But when the Koreans started winning medals, all those people could talk about was sports.”

Because it’s his job, anthropologist, MacAloon read great significance into that. He said that Koreans historically have a structured society, with a very distinct upper, middle and lower class, and that, for the first time he can remember, the upper and middle classes took a great interest in athletes, most of whom come from the lower class.

The Korean Amateur Sports Assn. (KASA) read something else into the Asian Games--12 to 15 gold medals for its athletes at the Olympics.

But great expectations often lead to great disappointments.

One year later, at the World University Games in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, South Korea won only two medals. Its soccer team went down without a fight against the Soviet Union, resulting in the appointment of a commission by the KASA to determine whether the South Koreans even tried to win. There were complaints throughout the country that the Korean athletes would give their best only if promised bonuses.

Dr. Kim Jip, a KASA official who presides over the Taenung Training Center for South Korean athletes in Seoul, since has revised the Olympic gold medal goal to six. But he said he fears that South Koreans will be disappointed if their athletes don’t win more.

“That is really a headache for me,” he said.

Causing him considerably more pain was the revelation earlier this year that former President Chun Doo Hwan’s brother embezzled millions of dollars from Saemaul Undong (New Community Movement), which oversees the KASA’s budget. As a result, the country’s developmental sports programs are virtually broke. The KASA will be restructured after the Olympics.

The KASA’s critics also would like to abolish the Taenung Training Center because of the rigid discipline forced upon athletes there. They train 6 days a week, beginning at 6:15 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m. Lights out at 10 p.m. Even at lunchtime, they are inundated with militaristic fight songs. The administrators say that they run Taenung like a boot camp.

Most athletes at Taenung say that they are committed to winning medals for South Korea, but there also is considerable pressure on them.

That drove Park Jong Whan, South Korea’s Olympic soccer coach, to resign in June.

“I can’t stand the pressure,” he said after his team played poorly during an international tournament in South Korea. “I don’t have the capability to lead the Olympic team.”

There was a particularly unpleasant incident last year involving South Korean middle-distance runner Lim Chun Ae, who won three gold medals at the Asian Games. The shy farm girl, only 17 at the time, became such a national hero that then-President Chun posed for pictures with her.

But on a day last year when she wasn’t feeling particularly enthusiastic about working out, Lim’s coach hit her on the side of the head. “Her coach was under pressure, and in no mood to tolerate what he felt was a bad attitude,” wrote French journalist Vincent Ricquart in his book, “The Games Within the Games.”

Lim went to the hospital with a ruptured ear drum. Her coach, embarrassed after the story was reported in the South Korean press, issued a public apology. So did Lim, saying that she would work harder in the future to fulfill her obligation.

A KASA spokesman later told the New York Times that it is an “open secret” that coaches hit their athletes.

It’s no wonder that more traditional Koreans are wondering about the advisability of all this emphasis on sports. They point out that Confucianism discourages physical activity of any kind, considering sports “a sign of frivolity, not to mention sheer madness.”

That quote comes from Ricquart’s book, which also points out that members of Korean royalty were baffled when they first saw foreigners playing tennis before the turn of the century. They wondered why anyone would run and sweat to chase a ball when the servants could do it just as well.