LAUSANNE, January 9, 2018 - It is paradoxical, but Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s authoritarian leader, unwittingly launched the largest and most sophisticated promotional campaign of the Winter Olympic Games, which will begin on February 9th in PyeongChang, South Korea. That is a first in Olympic history.

A few months ago this Olympics of ice and snow left the world indifferent. Yes, even in Italy, very few remembered the event’s imminence and the name of the site, PyeongChang, certainly did not help. It even gave way to confusion, because the sound is similar to Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Choi Moon-soon, the Governor of Gangwon Province, where PyeongChang is located, not far from the border with the North, highlighted this with an apt example. 

In February 2014, a Kenyan journalist decided to visit the Korean Olympic facilities and called a tourist agency to organize the trip. He enjoyed a fantastic flight and when he landed he asked who could help him to plan a visit to the Olympic venues. His interlocutors squared him coldly and replied: "Dear sir, you are a journalist and we hope that you are not making fun of us, but you have landed in Pyongyang, in the wrong country ..."

Kim Jong-un, with his fireworks-missiles, put PyeongChang on the map and gave it a new image. Even Donald Trump, with his tweets, helped out. Today, everyone is talking about the meeting of the Korean delegations in Panmunjom, a village in the demilitarized zone. I have been there and it gives you shivers. Army barracks are divided by the demarcation line. You can’t pass the line or risk getting shot immediately. That’s often happened in the past. The demarcation line even splits the negotiating table in two. The environment is Kafkaesque and belongs to a surreal world, but perhaps this time Panmunjom helped to open the door to real dialogue and this thanks to sport.