Ex-S. Korean Olympic table tennis champion 'pleased' to participate in friendly tournament with N. Korea

SEOUL, June 22 (Yonhap) -- Former South Korean Olympic table tennis champion Ryu Seung-min said Friday he is "pleased" to participate in a friendly tournament with North Korea.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will celebrate the annual Olympic Day on Saturday with a four-nation table tennis event featuring athletes from South Korea, North Korea, China and Japan. It will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland, home of the IOC.

Ryu, the 2004 Olympic men's single champion who is now a member of the IOC's Athletes' Commission, will represent South Korea alongside Kim Kyung-ah, a two-time Olympic bronze medalist.

The IOC organized the exhibition tournament in its continued support for the peace process on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia. In an earlier statement, the IOC said officials from the four countries' national Olympic bodies will also be on hand, and the tournament will be held in "celebration of sport's unique ability to build bridges and cultivate sportsmanship, which can translate into all areas of life."

In January this year, the IOC granted North Korean athletes special entries to compete at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea, and also allowed the two Koreas to form a unified women's hockey team -- the first joint Korean team in Olympic history.

"I am pleased to be taking part in this event as a player, and this is a significant event," Ryu said. "I'll do the best I can to help bring the four countries together through table tennis, and to promote the value of sports."

Ryu said the tournament will feature mixed doubles matches but will place athletes from different countries on the same team, instead of pitting one nation against the other.

Ryu was also instrumental in bringing the South Korean and North Korean women's teams together at the World Team Table Tennis Championships in Sweden last month. The two countries were scheduled to meet each other in the quarterfinals, but they decided to join forces instead and advanced to the semifinals, where they lost to Japan and settled for a bronze medal.

Representing North Korea on the Olympic Day event will be world No. 69 Kim Song-i, the women's singles bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and Pak Sin-hyok, the North's top-ranked male player at No. 150.

China will send the reigning Olympic men's and women's singles champions, Ma Long and Ding Ning. Japan will have Ai Fukuhara, who won silver in the women's team event at the 2012 London Games, and Tomokazu Harimoto, a 14-year-old phenom and the youngest-ever winner of an International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) World Tour men's singles title.

The exhibition event will be held five days after the two Koreas agreed to march in together at the opening ceremony for the Asian Games in August in Indonesia and to form unified teams at the same competition.

jeeho@yna.co.kr
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