Word: koreas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...International Olympic Committee, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is concerned, there is no going back on the 1981 decision to give the Games to South Korea. Said I.O.C. Spokeswoman Michele Verdier last week: "The Games have been awarded to Seoul, and there is absolutely no change in our position." Only an "act of war," she said, might change the committee's view. Verdier has solid precedent on her side: the quadrennial Summer Games have been suspended only three times -- in 1916, 1940 and 1944 -- and in each case because of a world conflict...
...even though the Olympics do not begin until Sept. 17, 1988, I.O.C. member nations, including the U.S., are watching the current turmoil in South Korea carefully. Says George Miller, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, who is worried about the future safety of his athletes: "We're not yet at the hand-wringing stage. But anytime there are disruptions in a country, naturally there are levels of concern." Willi Daume, a West German I.O.C. member who presided over the 1972 Munich Games, thinks that removing the Olympics from Seoul at this stage could even heat up the deteriorating situation...
...past six years, South Korea has labored to make the 1988 Summer Olympic Games -- the 24th of the modern Olympiad -- into a statement of the country's arrival as a sophisticated and confident middle power. But amid last week's tear gas and flaming Molotov cocktails, the linked rings of the Olympic flag had become not only a symbol of national aspirations but also an emblem of international worry. Around the world, a growing number of sports and political figures were voicing concern about whether South Korea would be able to stage the Games free from boycotts or violence...
...American political front, at least one presidential hopeful has focused on the Games. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, in the full flight of his still undeclared candidacy, last week told Kim Kyung-Won, South Korea's Ambassador to Washington, that he might urge a U.S. boycott of the Games. Jackson demanded that the political situation in Seoul be stabilized and that the regime improve its human-rights record. But a ranking White House official last week declared that the Reagan Administration would never threaten a boycott like the one the U.S. organized against Moscow in 1980 after the Soviet invasion...
...clouds on the horizon, the Seoul Olympics still promise to be perhaps the best-organized and best-equipped event ever. Over the past decade, South Korea has spent some $3 billion on preparations for the Games. Moreover, it finished the work well ahead of schedule, whereas at Montreal in 1976 the readiness of the facilities was in doubt right down to the wire. The graceful, 100,000-seat Olympic Stadium on the bank of the Han River, site of opening and closing ceremonies as well as track-and-field events, was finished in 1984. Eight miles south of the city...