The countdown to the first Winter Olympics to be held in South Korea will reach 200 days on Monday, with the east coast host city of PyeongChang ratcheting up its preparations and homegrown athletes chasing a record medal haul.
PyeongChang, which lies some 180 kilometers east of Seoul in Gangwon Province, won the bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics in July 2011. The competition will be held from Feb. 9 to 25 next year under the slogan "Passion. Connected."
PyeongChang 2018 will be the first Olympics in South Korea since the 1988 Seoul Summer Games.
A dozen venues in PyeongChang and its sub-host cities of Gangneung and Jeongseon will stage seven sports across 15 disciplines.
The PyeongChang Organizing Committee for the 2018 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games estimates 95 countries will send about 6,500 athletes and officials to take part in its Olympics.
They will vie for 102 gold medals at stake.
(Yonhap)
PyeongChang won its Winter Games bid on a third try. It lost to Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics and then to Sochi for the 2014 edition.PyeongChang finally beat out Munich, Germany and Annecy, France for the 2018 Olympics in an International Olympic Committee vote in 2011.
The 12 venues are all located within 30 minutes of each other, and it's the compact venue concept that helped PyeongChang win over IOC members.
The PyeongChang Mountain Cluster will be home to Alpensia Biathlon Centre, Cross-Country Skiing Centre, Ski Jumping Centre, Sliding Centre, Bokwang Snow Park and Yongpyong Alpine Centre.
Venues in Gangneung are some 20 kilometers east of the PyeongChang Mountain Cluster, and facilities there are Gangneung Curling Centre, Gangneung Hockey Centre, Gangneung Ice Arena, Gangneung Oval and Kwandong Hockey Centre.
Jeongseon Alpine Centre is the lone venue in Jeongseon, about 20 kilometers south of PyeongChang.
Six of the 12 venues are being constructed for the Olympics, while six existing facilities will be refurbished for the competition. The organizers are spending about 872 billion won ($776.1 million) on venue construction.
As of last Monday, the facilities were on average 96.8 percent complete. Eight are finished and ready for the Olympics.
Gangneung Ice Arena, the venue for short track and figure skating, and Gangneung Oval, which will hold speed skating races, have already staged international and domestic competitions.
Other venues have staged several Olympic test events in sports such as snowboarding, bobsleigh, skeleton, biathlon, ski jumping and curling.
South Korea has set out to collect up to 20 medals at PyeongChang 2018, including eight gold, and crack the top five in the medal race at home.
At the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, South Korea grabbed three gold, three silver and two bronze medals to rank 13th.
South Korea's best Winter Games performance came at Vancouver in 2010, when it won six gold medals and hauled in a record 14 medals total to finish fifth.
All 26 Winter Olympic titles by South Korea have come from ice events -- short track, speed skating and figure skating. It is eyeing stronger performances in sliding events in 2018.
A whopping 21 of those 26 gold medals have come from short track speed skating, and the country should pick up a few more on home ice.
Shim Suk-hee and Choi Min-jeong have dominated the women's competition of late and they will be considered heavy favorites.
Shim won three medals at her Olympic debut in 2014, while Choi is a two-time world overall champion.
In the 2016-2017 season, Shim finished first overall in the 1,500m in the International Skating Union World Cup points race, and Choi finished second in the 1,000m. With the two leading the way, South Korea captured four of the six World Cup relay titles.
In speed skating, Lee Sang-hwa will try to win her third straight gold medal in the women's 500m. Only Bonnie Blair of the United States has won three straight Olympic titles in the distance, though the third of Blair's title, at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, came two years after her second gold.
Two former short trackers will seek to become inaugural Olympic speed skating champions in mass start, a 16-lap race where all skaters start at once. Lee Seung-hoon and Kim Bo-reum ended the past ISU World Cup season ranked No. 1 in men's and women's mass start.
Yun Sung-bin in men's skeleton represents South Korea's best hope for the first Olympic medal in a sliding event. He has finished second overall in each of the past two International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation World Cup seasons. In eight World Cup races in the 2016-2017 season, Yun never finished worse than fifth. He had one win and three runner-up finishes, including one in PyeongChang in March.
Representing the PyeongChang Olympics will be a white tiger dubbed "Soohorang." A white tiger is a mythological guardian in Korean folklore and is considered sacred. (Yonhap)
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