PyeongChang’s winning bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics and a major match-fixing scandal in the nation’s top football league were the top sports news topics of 2011, a survey by Yonhap showed.
In the poll of 46 newspapers and broadcasters, the successful Olympic bid and the K-League match-fixing controversy topped the list with 46 votes each.
Between Dec. 6 and 13, sports editors were asked to choose their top 10 news items from a list of 35 issues, via email or telephone.
In July, PyeongChang, located some 180 kilometers east of Seoul, earned 63 of 95 votes in bidding against Munich of Germany and Annecy of France. It was PyeongChang’s third successive attempt to host South Korea’s first Winter Olympics.
Match-rigging attempts in K-League made the top-10 list for all the wrong reasons. Dozens of active and former players, including ex-All-Stars and national team members, were indicted or convicted, then banned for life from all football-related activities.
Players allegedly took cash from gambling brokers in exchange for deliberately making mistakes in games.
Gamblers bet on underdog teams and bribed players on favored clubs to throw games so they could earn high dividends. It was the first match-fixing scandal to rock K-League in its 28-year history.
The passing of two local baseball greats came in at third place with 43 media votes. On Sept. 7, Jang Hyo-jo, the career batting average leader in Korea Baseball Organization, died of liver cancer at age 55. A week later, Choi Dong-won, an MVP-winning power pitcher in the 1980s, succumbed to colorectal cancer.
PyeongChang’s bid team celebrates after winning the 2018 Winter Games. (Yonhap News)
Earlier this month, Cho Kwang-rae was abruptly dismissed as head coach of the national football team, and he accused the Korea Football Association of failing to take proper steps before firing him. There was also debate about the timing of his dismissal, and the controversy surrounding the move ranked fourth on the top-10 list.
It was followed by South Korea’s first World Championships in Athletics this summer. Daegu, a southeastern metropolitan city, hosted the signature event by the International Association of Athletics Federations from late August to early September.
Though the host country failed to win a medal, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt put on a dazzling show, winning two gold medals and helping his 4x100-meter relay team to a world record.
In October, golfer Choi Na-yeon claimed the Sime Darby LPGA Malaysia event and it was the 100th LPGA Tour win by Korean-born and Korean-American golfers. It earned 28 votes to rank sixth.
Two baseball-related items tied for seventh place. NCsoft, a local game company, founded a KBO club, named NC Dinos, and the expansion team is scheduled to join the eight-team KBO in 2013.
The league has enjoyed unprecedented popularity in recent seasons, and broke the single-season attendance record this year with more than 6.8 million fans, up from 5.9 million in 2010.
It was also a record-setting season for the Samsung Lions in the KBO, and news of their heroics finished ninth on the list. The Lions beat the defending champion SK Wyverns to claim the Korean Series crown. Then they became the first KBO club to win the Asia Series tournament, which brought together league champions from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. The Lions beat the SoftBank Hawks, the Japanese champion, in the final.
A tragic news item rounded out the list. In October, renowned mountaineer Park Young-seok and his two teammates went missing during their mission at the 8,091-meter Annapurna in the Himalayas, but the Korean Alpine Federation suspended its search after about a week, citing safety concerns for rescue climbers.
Park, who had already scaled Annapurna, is the world’s first man to complete the true Adventurers’ Grand Slam, which entails reaching the North Pole, the South Pole, scaling 14 mountains of at least 8,000 meters, and also the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each of the seven continents.
(Yonhap News)
