By Yoon Chul
Koreans felt indescribable joy when IOC President Jacques Rogge called out “PyeongChang,” and held up the card reading “PYEONGCHANG 2018,” as the victor at the International Convention Center in Durban, South Africa, Wednesday.
The elation was amplified and the scale of the Gangwon Province town’s achievement dawned when the result of the final vote was revealed.
PyeongChang received an overwhelming 63 out of 95 valid ballots in the first round, immediately ending the race to host the 2018 Winter Games. Munich of Germany got 25 votes, while France’s Annecy came a distant third with seven.
Not only was 63 the highest number of votes cast in the first round for a host nation in IOC history, it was far more than the Korean bid committee had anticipated.
Having suffered two bitter defeats in its decade-long pursuit to host the Winter Olympics, the committee went all out to earn votes of not only “Korea-friendly” IOC members but also those who hadn’t made up their mind yet.
Cho Yang-ho, head of the bid committee; Park Yong-sung, head of the Korea Olympic Committee; Lee Kun-hee, Samsung chairman and a Korean IOC member; and Kim Jin-sun, a special ambassador for the bid committee traveled extensively all over the world to appeal to voters, especially in Asia.
Park basically camped out in Frankfurt, Germany, to attract European voters while the Samsung chairman spent about 170 days since February 2010 crisscrossing the world to promote PyeongChang.
Two IOC members, Wu Ching-kuo of Taiwan and Nat Indrapana of Thailand are examples of how such strenuous efforts paid off. Wu, the president of the International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA) and Nat, a vice president of the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) didn’t look on Korea’s bid favorably as both had experienced disputes with other international Korean sporting officials.
In order to change their minds the representatives visited them several times to persuade them to recognize PyeongChang’s new vision and plans for the 2018 Games.
The Korean bid committee learned the hard way why an active diplomatic strategy was required with IOC members.
At the 119th IOC Session in Guatemala on July 4, 2007, PyeongChang lost to Sochi in the second round of voting. The committee said that many of the votes from African IOC members that Korea won in the first round were lost to Sochi in the second.
Drawing on that lesson, this time the Korean delegates did not stray far from the African members. After a presentation to the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa, the delegates headed to meet the 15 African IOC members individually.
The 110 IOC members are split between the continents. The European bloc has the most votes with 46 members representing 26 countries.
Asia comes in second with 24 IOC members from 21 nations, while North and South America combined have 20 and Oceania, five.
The two European cities of Munich and Annecy earned 32 votes to Korea’s 63.
That means at least 14 Europeans supported PyeongChang’s third bid.
Perhaps the Korean bobsleigh pioneer Kang Kwang-bae’s assistance was the critical push.
Kang, current vice president of FIBT, helped Adam Pengilly when the former England bobsleigh athlete tried to become an IOC member in 2010, and they have been solid friends since.
During an interview with The Korea Times last year, Kang said the pair have never discussed PyeongChang’s third bid.
But when Kang was asked whether Pengilly would support Korea, Kang just smiled without speaking.
The committee also systemically prepared to impress the IOC.
Each IOC member was visited by various committee officials, and the Korean delegates shared their experiences to underscore a more personal interest, which they didn’t do in the two previous attempts.
The PyeongChang bid committee also said before the vote about five percent of the total IOC votes were undetermined, which later were swayed by Olympic gold medalist Kim Yu-na and Korean-born American Olympic medalist Toby Dawson’s presentations.
President Lee Myung-bak also made a full presentation in English at the IOC General Assembly to help achieve the nation’s triumph.
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