North Korea have been suspended from the IOC (International Olympic Committee) until the end of 2022. The nation will miss out on the Beijing Winter Games next year after they failed to send a team to the Tokyo Olympics this year. “The National Olympic Committee of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is suspended until the end of the year 2022 as a result of its unilateral decision not to participate (in Tokyo),” IOC president Thomas Bach told a news conference. Bach said the decision meant the North Korean Olympic Committee would not receive financial support during the suspension and would definitively forfeit support that had previously been withheld due to sanctions.
The IOC chief said the IOC did reserve the right to make decisions on any individual North Korean athletes who qualify for Beijing 2022 and to reconsider the duration of the country’s suspension.
North Korea sent 22 athletes to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and won six medals at the Rio 2016 Games, but took the decision not to send competitors to Japan this summer due to fears around Covid-19.
It was the first occasion that the country did not attend an Olympics since 1988, when it boycotted the Seoul Games due during the Cold War.
