New Olympic sport?

Rico says he knows it's not, but how could he resist the photo on Choe Sang-Hun's article in The New York Times about the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang:

When the town of Pyeongchang first pitched its Olympic dream twelve years ago, some International Olympic Committee members confused it with Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Even within South Korea, it was known until recently mainly for having bid unsuccessfully for the 2010 and 2014 Winter Games.
“We never gave up, that’s what made the difference,” Yeom Don-seol, a Pyeongchang resident, said this week after the town of 43,000 prevailed over Munich and Annecy, France, to host the 2018 Games. “Now people from around the world will come here. We have finally marked ourselves on the map of the world.”
Villagers, many of whom farm, stayed up all night celebrating with fireworks and the favorite pastimes of rural South Korea: singing, dancing and drinking rice wine. In the capital, Seoul, a city of ten million, eighty miles to the west, shouts of joy erupted from high-rise apartment buildings when television networks broadcast the IOC’s decision from Durban, South Africa, shortly after midnight local time. “Patience and perseverance have prevailed, ” said Jacques Rogge, the IOC president.
Pyeongchang, fifty miles from the border with North Korea in the Taebaek Mountains, is in one of the country’s least developed provinces, Gangwon. In fact, the region’s Olympic drive can be seen in part as a reflection of a yearning to shed its backwater image, an impression reinforced by abandoned coal mines and steep hills scarred by barbed-wire fences, bunkers, and minefields placed there to guard against invasion by North Korea.
The province is also home to a number of Buddhist temples, including the famous Woljeongsa, founded almost 1,400 years ago, and, perhaps incongruously, to the only one of the country’s seventeen casinos open to South Koreans, a result of efforts more than a decade ago to breathe new economic life into struggling mining towns.
Pyeongchang is probably most identified with its abundant potatoes and hwangtae, or dried pollock; left for weeks to dry under a winter sun, the fish get as tough as cowhide and is considered a national delicacy. But, in recent years, the area has begun a physical transformation, matched perhaps only by a change in the attitudes of many South Koreans. People who once regarded winter sports as hobbies for the rich began to see opportunity in the Taebaeks, some of which rise more than five thousand feet. In time, the mountains and the ice rinks near Pyeongchang, traditionally a sleepy town, became a haven for winter sports enthusiasts and, ultimately, a site for international events, including the 1999 Winter Asian Games.
For more than a decade, the region has been in the grip of Olympic fever, one growing hotter since 2003, when Pyeongchang lost its bid for the 2010 Games to Vancouver. Signs on its streets and in taxicabs carry slogans like “Yes! Pyeongchang. Bulldozers have pushed on to clear potato fields and pine-covered hills to create a $1.5 billion resort complex called Alpensia that developers envision as a new Asian hub of winter sports. For the Olympics, there will be at least thirteen competition sites within thirty minutes of one another.
The first-ballot victory, by a 63-25 vote over Munich, Pyeongchang’s closest rival, has brightened the mood of a country surrounded by neighbors it has traditionally feared and mistrusted, and which has had a troubled year, with military provocations by North Korea, which is, in fact, never far from the minds of people in Pyeongchang. Many are the children of refugees who fled south during the 1950-53 Korean War. They settled in this rugged land to be near their homeland so they could return quickly if the countries reunified.
South Korea has long looked to major international sports events to reaffirm its confidence. In 1988, in a coming-out party for a young democracy, the Summer Olympics were held in Seoul. In 2002, South Korea was the co-host with Japan of the men’s World Cup soccer tournament. Next month, the world track and field championships will be held in Daegu.
Sports officials appear tireless in reminding the people that South Korea had become only the sixth country— after Japan, Germany, France, Russia, and Italy— to have won the rights to stage all four of the world’s biggest sports competitions: the Summer and Winter Olympics, the soccer World Cup and the track and field world championships.
Hosting the Winter Olympics, many say, will lift South Korea’s “national prestige,” as all of the national daily newspapers have editorialized. South Koreans tend to measure their worth in comparison with Japan, their former colonial master. They have smarted at the fact that Japan has been the only Asian country to host the Winter Olympics (in 1972 and 1998). After Pyeongchang’s two failed bids, securing the Winter Olympics became a test of national pride. Within two months of its defeat by the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi for the 2014 Games, Pyeongchang declared that it would not stop bidding until it won.
President Lee Myung-bak encouraged the nation’s top industrialists to lead the campaign: Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung; Cho Yang-ho, head of Korean Air; and Park Yong-sung, a tycoon turned chairman of the South Korean Olympic Committee. The president flew to Durban to give a personal pitch. “Out of sight, I have met many people here,” he told South Korean reporters in Durban, referring to his lobbying efforts. “I think I can sleep soundly tonight.”
The 2018 Olympics are expected to lift the local and national economies, creating 230,000 jobs and generating $20 billion in investments and consumption. And there is hope that Pyeongchang’s successful bid will also lead to cooperation with North Korea. “I hope that we can cede some of the games to North Korea across the border,” said Baek Yong-geun, a shopkeeper in Pyeongchang, “and make this an Olympics for Korean unification.”

Rico says no, it's Taebaek, not Tayback, but reunification is unlikely just now...