Opening ceremony plans for World Athletics Championships show how deep patriotism can run

Preparations: performers run through their moves ahead of the opening ceremony (Photo: REUTERS)

Son Kee-chung may not be a household name to everyone but for the South Koreans who attend Saturday’s opening ceremony at the World Championships in Daegu, a video of his life that will be shown on the giant screens inside the stadium is set to stir some potent emotions.

Son’s fame in Korea reaches well beyond athletics fans after he won a gold medal in the marathon at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin – under the flag of Japan, who occupied the Korean peninsula until the country was liberated from its neighbour’s colonial rule in 1945.

To add salt to Korean wounds, the International Olympic Committee still record Son’s achievement as a Japanese gold medal rather than a Korean one.

The IOC even persists with a Japanese version of his name – Kitei Son.

But Koreans are in no doubt to whom the medal really belongs, and Son became an overnight national hero in Berlin when he and fellow Korean Nam Sung-yong, the marathon bronze medallist, stood to attention with bowed heads during the playing of the Japanese national anthem in what they later explained was a show of “silent shame and outrage”.

Son’s victory in Berlin was also responsible for one of the earliest examples of photographic manipulation in the Korean newspapers.

Some newspapers managed to erase the Japanese national flag on Son’s vest from the blurred telegraphic pictures that arrived from Germany without attracting the attention of the Japanese censors.

But when a Korean newspaper, the Dong-A-Ilbo published on its front page a new, cleaner image with the Japan flag removed, the Japanese colonial authority hit the roof.

Journalists involved in the air-brushing were arrested and tortured and a number of newspapers were forced to close down.

Because of the furore, and Son’s status as a focus for anti-Japanese protest, he was prohibited from taking part in any further marathon races until the 1945 liberation.

After the war he switched to coaching, before moving into sports administration as vice-chairman of the Korean Sports Council and chairman of the Korea Association of Athletics Federations.

He was also a member of the organising committee for the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games and carried the Olympic torch into the stadium during the opening ceremony. He died in 2002 at the age of 90.

One wonders what the Japanese athletes and officials will make of the film screened in the Daegu stadium, though the Koreans appear to be in no mood to spare their discomfort.

A pile of posters of the athlete are available to international reporters at the official media hotel in Daegu, with a photograph of the runner appearing under a headline: “My country, My Marathon.”

Eleven months before the Olympics open in London, it is a reminder how deep patriotic emotions can run at the world’s greatest sports festival.