Word: koreas
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...clinching his seventh medal, Ohno turned in a clutch performance. On the whole, however, Ohno has been extraordinarily lucky in the Olympics. During the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Kim Dong-sung from South Korea crossed the finish line first in the 1,500-meter race. Ohno trailed behind him, and finished second. After Dong-sung started waving the Korean flag during his victory lap, the judges disqualified him for blocking Ohno. South Korea was furious, and took out their frustration on the American. Ohno received death threats. (Watch a video of future Olympians in Vancouver...
...South Korea's anti-Ohno sentiment was rekindled in Vancouver. In the 1,500-meter race on Feb. 13, two South Koreans skaters crashed on the last turn, allowing Ohno to move past them into second place. Afterward, Ohno said he might have won gold if the winner, South Korea's Lee Jung-Su, hadn't obstructed him. The Koreans accused Ohno of playing dirty. "Ohno didn't deserve to stand on the same medal platform as me," said Lee. When asked Saurday night if she liked Ohno, A Reum Han, a skating fan who traveled from Soeul...
During the Korean War, Ko was forced to cart away corpses. After, he became a Buddhist monk and wandered over the vales and hills of South Korea, a "nation of unending waves!" For 10 years he lived off alms, often sleeping in graveyards and caves. He also published his first poems, which he has since likened to "tufts of grass among the ruins" of the fratricidal war - a typically earthy metaphor for a poet derided by his detractors as artless and quaintly rustic. The landscapes in his poems are undeniably folksy. Villagers get drunk on bootleg makgeolli - the milky, fizzy...
...against successive military governments in the 1970s and '80s, has been turned into a museum of horrors, a red-brick Grand Guignol of simulated torture chambers as chilling as Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh or Changi in Singapore. To visit is upsetting but essential if you're to see Korea the Ko Un way - that is, an experience of harmonious extremes, a bracing yin and yang of Buddhas and booze, temples and taverns and, if you've scored a visa to Pyongyang, visits to both sides of the 38th parallel...
...iconic photo has Ko sandwiched between Kim Jong Il and South Korea's late President Kim Dae Jung, the friend and former jail mate for whom Ko penned an encomium included in Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), his 30-volume magnum opus profiling everyone he's ever met, as well as figures from Korean folklore and history. The three are toasting each other at a state banquet during the first Reunification Summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, during which Ko recited "At the Taedong River," an occasional poem that reportedly much moved the fearless Dear Leader. An earlier piece, written after...