North and South Korea to march under united flag at the Winter Olympics

North Korean and South Korean athletes will walk together in the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in South Korea next month.

Following the first high-level talks between the two nations since 2015, South Korea’s Unification Ministry announced that a joint delegation will walk under the flag of Korean unification at the opening ceremony at Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium on 9 February.

The flag, a pale blue silhouette of the Korean peninsula on a white background, was designed in 1991 to represent a combined North and South Korean team at the World Table Tennis Championships.

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At the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Winter Olympics, a joint North-South delegation marched under the Korean unification flag, although the two countries competed under their own national flags.

Talks for another joint delegation at the 2008 Beijing games failed, however, and since then the two countries have marched separately.

On Saturday, delegates from both Koreas will meet with International Olympic Committee officials at the body’s HQ in Lausanne on Saturday to finalise the arrangements.

John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at Harvard University, counselled against reading too much into the apparent thawing of relations on the fraught Korean peninsula.

"Both Koreas are primarily utilising the talks for a limited objective - arranging the participation of a North Korean delegation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics," he told CNN.

In a further breakthrough, however, the two nations also agreed to field a joint women’s ice hockey team, the first time since the Korean War that a united Korea team will participate in the Olympic Games.

This has proven a particularly difficult pill for some in the South to swallow. The Blue House, the official residence of South Korean president Moon Jae-in, has received “more than 100 petitions... opposing a joint Olympics team,” Sky News reports.

While some South Koreans are opposed to the move for political reasons, many sports fans are simply concerned that the South is scuppering its chances of a medal, the BBC reports.

North Korea has enjoyed some success at the Summer Olympics, but its prowess at alpine events leaves much to be desired. No North Korean athlete has won a medal at a Winter Olympics since 1992.

In contrast, South Korea often finishes near the top of medal table. At the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, in which North Korea did not participate, South Korea won eight medals, including three golds.