Olympic Games organisers said they "deeply apologise" for introducing South Korea's athletes as North Korea during the opening ceremony in Paris.
As the South Korean athletes waved their nation's flag on a boat floating down the Seine River on Friday evening, they were announced in both French and English as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. South Korea is the Republic of Korea.
"We deeply apologise for the mistake that occurred when introducing the Korean team during the opening ceremony broadcast," the International Olympic Committee said in a post on X in Korean.
The South Korean Ministry of Culture Sports and Tourism Vice Minister Jang Mi Ran requested a meeting with IOC President Thomas Bach over the incident, the ministry said in a statement Saturday.
It said the ministry also asked South Korea's Foreign Ministry to file "a strong government-level complaint" with the French government.
The statement said South Korea's Olympic committee separately asked the organisers of the Paris Games to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents.
IOC spokesperson Mark Adams on Saturday called the error "clearly deeply regrettable".
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"An operational mistake was made. We can only apologise, in an evening of so many moving parts. that this mistake was made," Adams said in response to a question from a South Korean journalist during a news conference on Saturday.
The Korean peninsula has been bitterly divided into South Korea and North Korea since the end of World War II in 1945.
The blue sign on the boat carrying the South Korean athletes did show the correct name.
The mix-up echoed another during the 2012 Olympics in London, where organisers posted the South Korean flag on a jumbo screen as a North Korean player was introduced before a women's soccer match, leading the North Koreans to refuse to take the field for nearly an hour.
In another opening ceremony glitch on Friday, the Olympic flag featuring the five rings was upside down when it was hoisted toward the end of the ceremony.
"It's regrettable," Adams said. "In a four-hour show occasionally things happen. We can all move on from that one, it's not the end (of the world)."
After the flag was raised, the broadcast by the IOC's own television operations did not show any close-up images of it.
Typically, flagpoles at Olympic ceremonies have a mechanism that blows a breeze across the flag to stretch it out.
On Friday, the Olympic rings flag hung limply down next to the pole.
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