It's Complicated: A Psychologist's Take on an Olympic Gaffe

During the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, the South Korean athletes were erroneously introduced as North Koreans. Outrage followed online. The IOC issued an apology, and IOC president Thomas Bach reportedly called South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol to apologize for the incident.

On social media, I read predictable online comments to the tune of, “What’s the big deal? Move on.” Laughing emojis were posted to suggest that this was a trivial matter. Some people made insensitive jokes that I will not repeat here.

As a psychologist, I found myself reflecting on why many South Koreans are so irked by this incident. Of course, any country’s leaders would be offended if their nation’s name was wrongly announced at a global event, but I would also argue that this incident has resulted in a level of frustration higher than what one might expect. Why might that be? I can think of two psychological perspectives to help understand the depth of the reaction.

First, perhaps it is because this incident mirrors the pains of racial microaggressions experienced by people from Asian backgrounds. Obviously, this incident was not an interpersonal slight or invalidation, as microaggressions are commonly defined (Sue et al., 2007), but it did reflect a microaggressive theme commonly experienced by Asians: namely, the homogenizing of incredibly diverse Asian cultures (Yeo et al., 2019).

I have lost track of the times that someone has attributed an Asian identity to me that is not mine. Recently, during a soccer match, an opposing player called Korean soccer player Hwang Hee-Chan “Jackie Chan.” Setting aside the eye-roll worthy absurdity of referring to anyone by a famous person’s name from that country—if you are American, imagine someone calling you Taylor Swift simply based on your nationality—Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong.

Back to the opening ceremony gaffe. Even if it was an honest mistake, the outcome of the mix-up is the perpetuation of the message that all Asian countries/ethnicities/cultures are alike; that many aspects of their identity are interchangeable. This mentality is what led Korean superstar Heung-Min Son’s own teammate Rodrigo Bentancur to declare on a TV show that Son and his cousins “all look the same.”

Second, and going even deeper, I also wondered if the level of public uproar over the incident was more amplified because the mistaken attribution was North Korea. Yes, one can confuse South Korea with any other country in the world and it would still be problematic, but to mix up South and North Koreas? It triggers a one-of-a-kind gut response. For South Koreans, this response is complicated, full of contrasting feelings. It’s anger, but it’s also sadness. It’s a posture of dismissal of North Korea and what it stands for, but it is also an intense longing for what could and should be. It’s the ongoing collective trauma of a country and its people lamenting a nation split in half ideologically and geographically.

And so when, during a globally televised event, the announcer mistakenly referred to South Korea as North Korea, it was not just any error. It was not even only a form of microaggression, as serious as that would have been. Instead, the incident triggered a spillover of the sensitive pain that South Koreans try to suppress in their everyday lives. It was a sharp reminder of the tragic necessity of having to differentiate between the two Koreas. It reflected a longing for one Korea, without having to use the qualifiers of “North” and “South." (The world had a glimpse of this when the two countries' athletes marched as one in the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics.)

Because of this collective angst operating at the subconscious and collective level, an incident like the one that took place at the opening ceremony was met with such strong emotions. I might even call it a form of Freud’s reaction formation—the expression of an opposite or different emotion to cover up another challenging emotion. Sometimes, outrage is an easier expression of a complicated, traumatized emotion of a collective.