Talk:Sport in North Korea

International success

The lead says: "North Korea has selected international sport competitions as a strategic focus, but so far the country's performance has not lived up to its expectations." The source (which is not about sport) says, referring to Giles Hewitt of AFP and his comments on the Rio Olympics:

Though “a virtual pariah state due to its nuclear weapons program, Hewitt said the country had made “international sporting success a strategic priority, with leader Kim Jong Un as cheerleader-in-chief.” Their best hope, he said, was weightlifting – though the star this week had to apologize for finishing second with a silver.

“While rival South Korea is an international sporting success,” Hewitt wrote, “the North’s sporting record has largely failed to fulfil its aspirations.”

The lead's paraphrase makes this a statement of fact, rather than a quoted opinion, and makes it general rather than specific to Rio. It drops the word "largely" and changes "aspirations" to "expectations", which are more short term and definite.

This source gives a different opinion:

It is quite fascinating that, despite the DPRK being a poor country, its athletes perform very well. Recently, the Voice of America calculated the GDP per medals coefficient for countries participating in the Rio, and the DPRK, surprisingly, ranked first place in the rating. As of August 20, North Korea moved down to 7th place, with Grenada in the lead.

Even on the raw medal tally, North Korea did not do badly at Rio. It did better than most competing countries, many of which have larger populations. I don't think we should cherry-pick sources to give negative assessments.--Jack Upland (talk) 22:51, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

I agree, Jack. The statement (added by me) is probably not the best summary of NK's sports record, but this is a very underdeveloped article that consists of summaries of individual sports, and I thought it's a start in terms of a more general description. The source is a bit ambiguous as to whether this statement pertains to Rio only or performance in international competitions in general. If we take the strict interpretation (and we should), it's only about Rio. Then it and the medal tally are better suited in the article North Korea at the Olympics or even North Korea at the 2016 Summer Olympics. I don't want to cherry-pick here, and that statement in the lead strikes as a bit like that to me too, but we have to start somewhere: currently this article makes no effort to discuss sport in North Korea outside of individual disciplines or individual competitions. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 23:08, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

OK. This touches on the issue in relation to weightlifting. I think we could say something like, "North Korea aspires to international sporting success and to holding international sporting events." It's probably better to avoid assessments of success because it's unclear what benchmark to use. Should North Korea be expected to outperform the US or South Korea? Is Grenada really the world's leading sporting nation? Does it matter that North Korea got more medals than Finland?--Jack Upland (talk) 00:43, 24 August 2016 (UTC)