Chang Ung, North Korean ex-IOC member who brokered Olympic joint marches with South, dies
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Chang Ung, a former North Korean member of the International Olympic Committee who once led sports exchanges with rival South Korea including joint marches of their athletes at the Olympics, has died, the IOC announced Wednesday. He was 87. The IOC said on its website that it had learned with “extreme sadness” of Chang’s death on Sunday.
It said the Olympic flag will be flown at half-mast for three days at Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland in a show of respect. The IOC statement didn't describe the cause of Chang's death. North Korea’s state media has not reported on his death.
Born in 1938, Chang was originally a basketball player who captained the North Korean national team. After retiring from the sport, he became an athletics administrator, serving as a vice sports minister, a vice chairman of North Korea’s national Olympic Committee and a vice president of the Olympic Council of Asia. In 1996, Chang was elected to the IOC.
As North Korea’s only-ever IOC member, he represented his country on international sports fields and headed numerous — if often rocky — talks with South Korea to promote sports exchange and cooperation programs between the rivals. The most notable results of this diplomacy came at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, when athletes of the two Koreas marched together under a “unification flag” depicting their peninsula during the opening and closing ceremonies, the first joint parade since their division in 1945. Athletes of the Koreas walked together at following Olympic Games and major international sports events, including the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea.
After watching a joint march in Pyeongchang’s opening ceremony, Chang told reporters that he was “deeply moved. " Chang played a key role in earlier talks with South Korea, which led to the two countries sending their first unified male and female teams to the 1991 world table tennis championships in Chiba, Japan. In Pyeongchang, the two Koreas fielded their first combined Olympic team for women’s ice hockey.