North Korean cheerleaders: Give me a Y

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

The dear leader’s cheerleader

FEW North Koreans can claim an online fan club in South Korea. Ri You Kyung boasts two. She travelled to the South in 2002 with the Northern group taking part in the Asian Games, held that year in Busan, a city on its southern coast. Ms Ri was neither an athlete nor a diplomat. She was a cheerleader.

Known as an “army of beauties” in the South, the young North Korean women have, at past sporting events, often been lavished with more attention than their athletes. The cheerleaders’ sharp moves, brutal good looks and demure uniforms caused a collective swoon among Southerners during the games in Busan. They charmed again at the 2003 Daegu Summer Universiade and, in smaller numbers, at the 2005 Asian Athletics Championships in Incheon.

So it was a downer when, on August 29th, North Korea said that at the forthcoming Asian Games it would not be sending its female squadron to cheer its team (and boo the Japanese). The games begin on September 19th in the South Korean city of Incheon. The troupe’s trip south, mooted by the North in July, would have been the first since 2005 when none other than Ri Sol Ju (see picture), now the wife of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, joined the North’s cheerleading team.

Much has changed since those cordial days. South Korea’s current leader, Park Geun-hye, prefers to keep the North at arm’s length. Her government said it would not pay the North Korean’s expenses. It questioned the size of the national flag to be displayed by the North’s athletes and even—says the North—the scale of its cheerleading squad. Remarkably, having threatened to boycott the games altogether, the North says it still plans to send 150 athletes.

But the absence of Northern cheerleaders will be a blow. Some politicians say the presence of North Korean cheerleaders is an “essential condition” for the games’ success. They fret that fewer tickets will now be sold. The South’s cheerleaders are sad, too; they had wanted both squads to cheer together.

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