Defection Watch: North Korea’s World Cup Team
The matches of this year’s World Cup have delivered many sensational moments, but behind the hum of the vuvuzelas and the bright stadium lights, North Korea’s soccer squad may indeed deliver the biggest surprise of all.
Always a curious sighting outside of their hermitage country, North Korean athletes are often assumed to be high defection risks, given their rare opportunity to escape the hard living conditions of their country, even despite their own privileged positions on the national team. However, their strictly controlled movement in South Africa during the games shows just how far the North Korean government will go to avoid any possible escape. The team is sequestered in a tightly secured hotel north of Johannesburg and has largely stayed out of the public eye. The entire team dines together and travels in a bus with its curtains firmly closed, always accompanied by government officials between their hotel and the training grounds.
When four players on the team failed to show up for the teams first game against Brazil last week, most speculated they had already made the jump. However, all four players we spotted again several days later on the team bus.
The players’ disappearance and reappearance however, was only the first strange occurrence before the Brazilian match. Just before Tuesday’s game began, a five-row block of seats on the second level at Ellis Park Stadium filled up with more than 40 men and a woman, all dressed in identical red shirts, jackets and scarves, wearing identical red caps and waving small North Korean flags. During the game, ESPN’s game announcer Martin Tyler commented that the group that appeared to be North Koreans, weren’t actually North Koreans, but rather “handpicked Chinese Actors,” recruited by a Chinese sports marketing company on behalf of North Korea. Wild speculation grew that North Korea was too scared to let their own citizens out of the country and had to outsource its supporters instead.
The North Korean team’s possible defection was given added fuel today after their 7-0 loss to Portugal. This defeat, which ranks as one of the worst all time losses in World Cup history, will definitely not win them praise or national recognition back home as their earlier 2-1 respectable loss to Brazil afforded them. Therefore, with their prospects of returning home as heroes now diminished, are we likely to see a few players sneak off?
