The Winter Olympic Games begin on Friday at Pyeongchang in eastern South Korea. There has been plenty of good news around this biennial, international gathering. Thailand will have four competitors in the skiing competition. That puts the emphasis on the Olympics as an event of peace and participation, as well as competition. Unexpectedly, North Korea decided at the last moment to join and to participate in the Pyeongchang Games.
Pyongyang's sudden decision to show its sunny disposition after its nuclear and missile belligerence is welcome. South Korean and Japanese leaders expect the situation to be brief, because Dear Leader Kim Jong-un and his regime have not switched their political and military outlook. The rapprochement is welcome, no matter how short. For one thing, it takes a lot of pressure off the planners of Olympic security.
North Korea could have entered the Pyeongchang Olympics long ago. Because Mr Kim chose to wait until the last minute, the Pyongyang participation is to be makeshift and mostly on the sidelines.Several women hockey players were assigned to South Korea's team. That was not greeted with universal glee in the South. The team had to break the hearts of many players by releasing them to make room for the northerners.
It is significant, however, that Mr Kim sent Kim Yong-nam to the Olympic festivities. He is the president of the North Korean parliament, and in effect the North Korean version of a head of state. He will be on hand on Friday when 22 North Korean athletes line up with the South Korean Olympics team for the opening parade. All the Koreans will enter under a unification flag.
Even if the Korean detente lasts only weeks, it will still be better than the problems that Russia has presented to the Games. Moscow has stood by its many drug-taking athletes, and is working hard to get as many as possible of the law-breakers into the Pyeongchang Games. Russia as a nation already has been barred by the International Olympic Committee for its undoubted conspiracy to dope and keep its athletes from punishment. The IOC back-tracked and said that Russians can compete under a "neutral flag", which makes the entire campaign about doping.
And it gets worse. Last week, the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, under strong pressure from the very top of the Russian government, overturned most of the the findings of cheating. Legally, then, the Pyeongchang Olympics are obligated to accept into the competitions athletes recently found guilty of doping -- while barring all others, from all other countries. This serves Russian political interests, and the IOC's commercial ones.
Those who criticise this unholy alliance of Moscow, the IOC and convicted drug-taking athletes have said the Pyeongchang Olympics are tainted. They are not wrong. Certainly the IOC's claim to be taking a tough stance against doped and rules-breaking athletes has been exposed as a joke. At the last moment, on Monday, the IOC turned down 15 of those 28 athletes for participation at Pyeongchang. This changes nothing.
While the conduct of the Winter Olympics is barely an issue in Thailand, it is extremely important. The IOC, like football's Fifa, has been charged and occasionally confirmed to be corrupt. If the men (mostly) who run the Games cannot be trusted to get it right with obvious, flagrant rules-breakers, how can it be trusted to run a clean Olympics and be free of special interests when picking Olympic cities? Of course it cannot.
The solace will be that most of the athletes at the Korean games on Friday will be young people, exuberant and enthusiastic about competing under their nations' flags. The small Thai contingent will be a part of this large majority. The Olympics deserve to be free of politics, so good luck to those dedicated athletes, and let the Games begin.
