Passion. Connected.

Every other year something strange happens; people (like me) who don’t normally care about sports suddenly have a favourite sport, national team, and athlete. The catalyst, of course, is the Olympic Games – or the Winter Olympics as in this year.

This year the games take us to South Korea and, as we’ve seen from the opening ceremony on Friday, they’re putting all their technical excellence to work. The opening ceremony featured a wonderfully beautiful light show using augmented reality and drones showing light flying across the country before turning into a giant skier and joined 100 skiers – all lit up themselves – to ski down the competition slope before the group formed the Olympic rings. The ceremony, and these games, are about more than sport though. They are a celebration of sport and culture with nearly 3,000 athletes from around the world.

But the next few weeks, the Olympics and then the Paralympics, represent something far more important than sport, technology, and even culture. They are about unity and what we can achieve when we come together.

One of the loveliest things about the Olympics is those moments when you can see communities and people come together. I was lucky enough to see that in person when I got tickets to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

This year that moment of visible unity was so much more spectacular this year than in previous games; this year saw two countries in the midst of a 60-year war not only be in the same place, but march together under a single flag.

Lovely to see South and North Korea walking into the #PyeongChang2018 #OpeningCeremony as a unified team under a united flag. Sport can bring people and countries together and this is a great step forward for the region #Olympics
@theitkid on Twitter

That is the power of the Olympics and, I guess, sports in general. They act as a unifying force in the world. At a time when global tensions are ever increasing few things seem to offer any sort of release, but then again few event offer an opportunity to see Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un dance together (well, lookalikes of them anyway).

It is hard to imagine any other event being seen as significant enough to get North and South Korea standing together and even fielding a single Korean ice hockey team made up of members from both countries.

This unity which sport brings was highlighted for me in two parts of the International Olympic Committee’s President’s speech. IOC President Thomas Bach used that phrase “in sport, we are all equal”. It was short and yet still managed to sum up exactly what the Olympics stands for. The other bit of his speech which really resonated with me was longer and even more meaningful:

This will be the competition of your life. You will inspire us all to live in peace and harmony despite all the differences we have.
- Thomas Bach, IOC President

His talk of inspiration and peace and harmony is quite true. The Olympics always has inspired people to get active, get involved, and look for that sense of unity.

I wish to end this post with another quote; this time from Lee Hee-beom, the president of the committee set up to organise the games. It is a quote which, I believe, defines how we should all see the Olympic Games:

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.
- Lee Hee-beom, POCOG President