Some fun facts about the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, one year out:
- Pyeongchang is a city of some 43,000 people that, until recently, was best known for ancient Buddhist temples, growing potatoes and producing a national delicacy of dried fish.
- The Olympic city is just 80 kilometres from the border with North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong-un has said he can launch an intercontinental ballistic missile any time he wants, a claim U.S. President Donald Trump dismissed with an “It won’t happen!” tweet.
- The 2018 Olympic mascot is a white tiger named Soohorang. The white tiger is part of Korean folklore and is said to represent snow and ice for the Games. Beyond the waving mascot and plush toys that will be on sale, the white tiger is almost exclusively found in captivity and a product of breeding tigers with a rare genetic mutation.
- There are 24 sport pictograms for the Pyeongchang Olympics, based on the Korean alphabet Hangul. The slanted and curved lines of the Hangul characters were used to create dynamic images that capture the movements of the athletes.
- Inbee Park, who won the first Olympic gold in women’s golf in 2016 (along with seven golf majors) is one of South Korea’s best-known summer athletes. As for winter sports, it’s now retired Yuna Kim, whose 2010 Olympic gold and 2014 silver in women’s figure skating are the nation’s only two winter medals outside of short- and long-track speed skating.
- South Korea hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics as a coming-out party for a young democracy and has long wanted to host the Winter Games — losing out to Vancouver in 2010 and Sochi in 2014 before winning the 2018 Games vote over Munich and the French alpine town of Annecy.
- Pyeongchang 2018 is the first Winter Olympics to be held in Asia outside of Japan (1972 Sapporo and 1998 Nagano), but it’s the beginning of a three-Games Asian road trip with Japan, again, hosting the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games and China the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
- Ticket sales are set to being on Feb. 9. Organizers have said they hope to sell 70 per cent to locals and 30 per cent to international tourists.
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