Olympics open in South Korea

The Winter Olympics have begun in South Korea

Hi everyone, I’m Jeff and you are listening to Plain English, the podcast that goes at just the right speed for English language learners. Today is Thursday, February 15, 2018; I hope you had a nice Valentine’s Day yesterday. Today’s episode is about the Olympics in PyeongChang—we’ll talk a little beat about the region it’s in, what the opening ceremonies were like, and a few other details about the Games. In the second half of the show, I’ll show you how to use the English phrase “third time’s the charm.”

Don’t forget that you can read along as you listen. The full transcript of today’s episode is available on the web site, PlainEnglish.com. Today is Episode 21, so the URL is easy to remember: PlainEnglish.com/21 and you will see the full transcript. If you speak Spanish, French, Portuguese or Chinese, you have to check out the web site because we’ve got translations of all the tough words and phrases. So you can listen, read along, and when you get to a word you don’t know, it shows you the definition instantly, in your language, so you never have to stop. So that’s for Spanish, Portuguese, French and Chinese speakers—the URL once more is PlainEnglish.com/21.

So with that out of the way, let’s get started on the main part of today’s episode.

Olympics open in South Korea

Are you watching the Olympics this year? The world’s eyes are turned to PyeongChang, South Korea, the host of this Olympics. The third time was the charm for PyeongChang, which beat out France and Germany on its third bid for the Winter Olympics.

So what do we know about PyeongChang? It’s actually not a city, but a county in South Korea, about 80 miles from the capital city, Seoul, and only 60 miles from the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea. It’s in a somewhat rugged, mountainous area in the Taebaek Mountains.

Only about 45,000 people live in the whole county, making PyeongChang the smallest host since Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994. Although PyeongChang is the host, some events will be held in the coastal city of Gangneung and a nearby county of Jeongseon.

The area is known as the Happy 700 because it’s about 700 meters above sea level, which they say is the optimal altitude for the well-being of humans and animals. It provides good snow for winter sports, but a moderate climate in the summer; hard to argue with that, right?

You may have seen the mascot for this year’s games, a white tiger named Soohorang. A white tiger is symbolic of a guardian in Korean culture.

The opening ceremonies took place last Friday at Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium, a temporary venue that holds about 35,000 people. The ceremony was relatively quick at just over two hours, and somewhat simple—but that seemed appropriate considering it was outside and really cold. The challenge for the hosts is to translate a message of the games into a ceremony that can be understood across cultures and languages. This year’s ceremony showed a journey of five children through space and time, featuring flying trains, self-driving cars, surgery, and letters flying off a page. A children’s chorus sung the South Korean national anthem. I only saw the clips, but most reviews were generally favorable.

One funny moment in the opening ceremonies came during the parade of nations. If you’ve ever watched this part, it’s kind of interesting to see all the athletes march into the stadium with the flags of their countries, but it tends to be long and kind of boring. After Greece starts, all the other countries come in in alphabetical order, and when it was Tonga’s turn—Tonga is a small island nation in the Pacific—when it was Tonga’s turn, a familiar face came out. That familiar face was Pita Taufatofua, who actually marched in the parade shirtless, just as he did in the Summer Olympics in Brazil, only this time in the freezing weather. In Rio, he competed in Tae-Kwon Do; this time, he qualified as a cross-country skier—interestingly, for a nation that may never have seen snow. I thought for sure he would be the first athlete to compete in both the Summer and Winter Olympics—but boy, was I wrong. He’s actually the 138th athlete to do that!

I’m not sure how far Pita is going to get in cross-country skiing, since he just barely qualified, but I’ll be watching. What sports do you like watching the most? There are 102 total events in 15 sport disciplines, like sports groupings. Personally, I like downhill skiing, bobsledding, and speed skating. Over the last few days I was watching some snowboarding; I had never watched snowboarding at the Olympics before, but it is fun to watch. And a 17 year old from the United States took a gold medal on Saturday. I don’t know what all of you were doing when you were 17 years old, but he’s definitely doing more than I was at that age.

It’s fun to see what all the different nations are good at. The Dutch are good at speed skating; the Austrians at alpine skiing; the Americans and Russians always seem to be good at figure skating; and Canada at ice hockey. Norway stands out, at least to me, for some of the long, hard sports like cross-country skiing and biathlon. Actually Norway has the most medals of any country in the Winter Olympics history.

And speaking of medals, each Olympics has a unique medal design. That’s something I didn’t know until today. The medal design this year has diagonal lines that resemble the texture of tree trunks, in a nod to PyeongChang’s location in a rural region. The medals hang on teal and red ribbons embroidered with designs from the Korean alphabet.

The Winter Olympics last until February 25.

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