Running for Comrade Kim

Sport is the best ambassador of a country! It is impossible not to have heard this sentence in the last three decades. According to AFP information, several athletes from our country have been our ambassadors in North Korea. We will not go into details about who sent them and with what message that it is possible to end up in a situation similar to the one in the USA, with Romanian emissaries withdrawn before speaking twice.

Given the geopolitical context, it was hard to imagine that some Romanian runners would sprint briskly through the center of the North Korean capital, at the marathon organized in honor of the birthday of the late Kim Il Sung (better known to us as Kim Il-sen), but, more recently, everything is possible. In case you don't know who Kim is, we'll clarify: the founding leader of communist Korea, born in 1912. Last Sunday, under the watchful eyes of local authorities, led by Kim Jong-un (son of Kim Jong-il, who is the son of Kim Il-sung), the crowd applauded both the athletic performance and the fact that the participants didn't run in the wrong direction, towards the border. From Romania, a few athletes got there through a tour organized by Koryo Tours - an agency that claims to be the "exclusive partner" of the marathon. That is, if you want to run under banners with revolutionary messages and supervised smiles, they arrange everything for you: from the visa to the ideal position for the photo at the finish.

The foreign runners, 200 in number - from Romania, China, Morocco and Ethiopia - started the marathon at the Kim-Il-Sung Stadium, with a photo session, so that upon their return they could prove that they were there and did not dream it all, due to fatigue. For North Korea, the event was also a kind of international PR test: "Look, we let foreigners run on our streets! What more proof of freedom do you want?". Meanwhile, the tourist runners enjoyed the scenery: people cheering them on and holding signs, without knowing exactly what was written on them. We don't know the age of the tricolor athletes, but if there were any brave ones over 50, then they could have felt at home at the end of the 80s. Otherwise, dear ambassador athletes, take off your hat or cap (on the local model), you ran for glory, for sport and, perhaps, for the strangest future post on social networks placed under the hashtag "controlled freedom".

Who won the race? We didn't find out, but we can say that the Romanian athletes, as a group, as the Pyongyang press claimed in 2010 that the North Korean team became world football champions. In certain regimes, everything is possible!