Olympics Meetings Begin in Korea

(ATR) The year's biggest gathering of Olympic leaders gets underway this weekend in Seoul, South Korea.

The Association of National Olympic Committees holds its biennial General Assembly starting Sunday, with 201 out of the world's 203 NOCs expected to attend. American Samoa and Monaco are the only two not coming.

Also meeting along with ANOC is the IOC Executive Board, while at the end of next week the SportAccord convention will bring more than 1,000 delegates from the sports business industry.

The meetings in Seoul could be seen as a test of Korea's changing sports leadership. Un Yong Kim, the IOC member who arranged the meetings more than two years ago has resigned, while another IOC member, Y.S. Park was suspended last month pending an appeal of corporate corruption charges.

Kun Hee Lee, chairman of Samsung and now Korea's only active IOC member, will host a reception for IOC colleagues on the opening day of the ANOC meetings. While he is now Korea's senior IOC member, Lee has kept a low profile for many months as he wrestled problems with his health, family and business.

For the Korean Olympic Committee, which has had two presidents in the past two years, current chief Jung Kil Kim is keen to show the KOC can competently stage the events of the next week.

With a bid from PyeongChang for the 2014 Olympics now in play, Kim hopes the success of the meetings leads to positive vibes for the South Korean bid, as IOC rules will not permit PyeongChang to use the gatherings to directly promote its bid. Kim is promising to stick to the rules and not give the Korean bid an advantage over its six other rivals.

Those other cities are also attending the meetings and will be bound by the same IOC rules as PyeongChang that prohibit international promotion at this stage of the campaign.

Korean Olympic Committee officials tell Around the Rings they have even had to be careful about who they invited to the Seoul meetings. While many IOC members will be in Seoul, they are here by virtue of their status as president or secretary general of an NOC. IOC rules will not permit specific invitations to IOC members who would not be coming to Seoul in that capacity, as long as Korea has an active bid for the Olympics.