Could this Olympic selfie signal a new kind of ping-pong diplomacy?

When table tennis players from North and South Korea posed together for photographs, it was a heartwarming highlight of the Paris Olympics and proof of the healing power of sport – but for those involved, there might also be terrible consequences in store, says Matt Potter

South Korean table tennis player Jonghoon Lim takes a selfie with other Olympic medallists – including those from North Korea (REUTERS)

When North and South Korea’s table tennis medal-winners posed for selfies together on the Olympics podium, in a rare show of unity, viewers around the world were charmed. But we were also a little worried, too.

Tensions between the two states are running even hotter than usual. Last week, North Korea’s dispersed 3,000 balloons carrying household rubbish, cigarette butts, discarded batteries and manure across the world’s most heavily fortified border – retaliation for the south’s own propaganda efforts: leaflet drops, and blaring K-pop and foreign news bulletins through giant loudspeakers to demoralise the troops stationed along the frontline.

With the nations technically at war, the Olympic selfie, an innocent, even beautiful gesture – the digital era equivalent of a Christmas Day game of football in the trenches – ought to help ease tensions. Think of it as a new kind of ping-pong diplomacy in action.

Or, it could go the other way and deepen a dangerous rift at a terrible time. Certainly, it could land the North Korean athletes – who won their country its first Olympic medal since 2016, a silver in the mixed doubles event – in serious trouble on their return. And should they refuse to return to Pyongyang at all and instead seek a new life as a sporting dissident, their families will likely suffer the consequences.

In spite of the dangers, at nearly every modern Olympics, individuals (and even entire teams) have sought asylum from or tried to disappear into the host country. Indeed, an entire sector has evolved to manage such eventualities. “Cleaners” – intelligence agencies and diplomatic soothers who make such perilous moves possible – are as much a part of the modern Olympiad as big-money official sponsors, brand new white-elephant stadia and Claire Balding.

This post-war trend was kickstarted by gymnastics coach Marie Provazníková, who refused to return from the London 1948 Games to post-coup Communist Czechoslovakia. But it was the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne that saw defections become one of the most enduring team events.

Aided by a CIA-run secure comms pipeline, a stunning 61 athletes defected – at least 46 of them Hungarians, who just weeks before had seen Soviet tanks invading Budapest, massacring more than 20,000 civilians and executing government officials. The water polo semi-final between Hungary and the USSR became known as the Day of Blood in the Water, for the summary vengeance meted out to the Soviet team. After that, there could quite literally be no going back to Hungary.

By the 1972 Games in Munich, 117 athletes defected. In Montreal 1976, four Romanians and a Soviet approached Canadian immigration officials and announced their wish to defect. The USSR thundered that it was a “kidnapping” of their citizenry by the West, and threatened to pull out of the Games entirely. In fact, the missing athlete, 17-year-old diver Sergei Nemtsanov had absconded in pursuit of an American girl he’d met at a diving event in Florida the year before. Canada discreetly extended his stay by a few weeks so the youngsters could get it out of their system. Within weeks, Nemtsanov was back in Russia.

Not that the Soviets were wrong to be paranoid. The Hungarians were helped by a clandestine CIA project known as Operation Griffin. Cubans are the most prolific defectors, vanishing in handfuls at almost every event; while the fear of humiliating mass defections by those facing shortages and repression during Brezhnev’s Great Stagnation was cited as one of the reasons the Soviet Union refused to take part in the 1984 Olympics.

The fact is, the more repressive the regime, the more likely athletes are to want to leave – and the more likely they are to have asylum claims accepted. But, if past form is any guide, by putting themselves in the global spotlight, the North Korean table tennis doubles team have also guaranteed their future safety, even if their selfie is viewed back home by officialdom as an act of insolence.

It reminded me of Mexico City 1968, when the gold- and silver-medallist sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist on the podium as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, in protest at the plight of US civil rights. The pair were booed by the crowd and expelled from the Games, criticised by the IOC and slammed by the US press. But the gesture – and the change it represented – proved longer-lasting than any temporary outrage.

Who knows, maybe what looked like a harmless selfie between two old enemies will become a herald of something unstoppable, too.