The Winter Olympics of PyeongChang2018 are over. Nonetheless, I’d like to share my view on the whole Olympics and the day of February 18, on which I watched Ice Hockey Men GER-NOR (group stage) and Biathlon Men’s 15km mass start.
This year’s Winter Games were much cheaper than the last ones in Sochi, partly because the stadium for the ceremonies is only a temporarily standing structure (it is to be deconstructed after the games) and because there was less investment in infrastsructure projects. The latter was definitely noticable: while the road and rail network is perfectly fine and needs no change, the usage of those networks did not always seem optimal to me. Because accomodation prices were out of bounds during the olympics, the only option was to find a way to get to Gangneung Ice Arena in the morning and to find a way back to Seoul at the same day. Here my possibilities:
1. KTX (bullet train): provided cheap one-way tickets and shuttle trains for day-wise KORAIL pass holders. Sadly KORAIL only offered 5- and 7-day passes and too few trains to use, so that the simple tickets were sold out in a matter of hours, already gone when I visited the site while I still was on vacation in Cambodia.
2. Olympic Shuttle Buses from Seoul: AFAIK those would have been free of charge, however there were not enough of those either.
3. Distance Buses from private companies: That’s what I had to default to in the end, which also meant rushing from the Biathlon Centre back to Gangneung Express Bus Station after the Biathlon event because the departure time was not the most comfortable one.
The events themselves were the highlight of the day for me. The ice hockey game between Germany and Norway was a close one, albeit not being on the highest level of play. But that didn’t bother me and my friend who tagged along too much, as we didn’t even have a reading on the rules of this sport. In fact, this actually made the game more exciting for us (together with the fact that he is Norwegian)!
The biathlon race was a close one aswell, with Germany and Norway winning silver and bronze.
While the athletic side of the games definitely was top-notch, I am not entirely sure on how to rate the whole atmosphere and the spirit I soaked up during that day. Both events had good and weak moments to them.
The hockey arena had quite some free seats left and the amounts of whole-hearted fans for Germany and especially for Norway was too low to considerably boost the atmosphere of the whole stadium; the tiny island of germany-fans was surrounded by empty space and thus seemed more like a separate place for weird people than for those responsible to bring some life into the crowd. On the other hand, they still helped to cheerfully bring some life into the stadium, which at some point even managed to maintain a stadium wave over two full rounds!
The biathlon crowd in the well-filled standing admission was very multi-colored and happily cheered for each and every athlete on the track. It even made me ignore the fact that I didn’t see the shooting range from my position, because I was busy cheering for the German athletes and talking to other fans. On the other hand, all the pre-race shows were shown in front of the first one of the two sitting blocks only, which together with the completely empty second block established a strange feeling of disconnection between the “official” fan zone and us in the standing admission.
The vibe in the Gangneung Olympic Park/the Alpensia Centre was… underwhelming. The olympic park, hosting most of the on-ice disciplines as well as the opening and closing ceremonies, was a crowded sell-out happening above all, with companies like McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Alibaba and Samsung marketing their own image and products rather than anything Olympia-related. For those who did want to buy Olympia-related stuff on the other hand, there was the hopelessly overrun “PyeongChang Super Store” selling merchandise. Waiting in line for at least 30 minutes to get into the store however was not worth it for us, as wasn’t the equally long wait in the restaurants to be able to order. That’s why we went out of the Olympic Park to look for food, and we found a nice korean restaurant (with REAL korean food) run by a sympathetic elderly couple.
The Alpensia Centre was empty by the time we arrived there (half past seven-ish), with the exception of the volunteers, some police officers and the biathlon fans already waiting inside the venue. Having a walk around the place before the event started cemented my impression that pretty much everything I saw on that day was established and built just for the Olympics and will soon be disintegrated or forgotten because there is no further connection between the local people and these structures.
To sum it up, this once-in-a-lifetime visit of such an international event will definitely stay in my memories for a long time, despite the many things I criticized so far in this entry. One could still feel the spirit of open-minded people competing in a fair competition and the same spirit celebrating the multitude of athletes on the stage. And to be honest, it has been obvious for many years now that the organizers’ and sponsors’ main motivation to host this type of large-scale international events is money, political influence and a visibility campaign rather than genuinely bringing people together in a celebration of peaceful and fair competition. But having that in mind, I still enjoyed that day!