A Sportswriter’s First Impressions of Pyeongchang

Olympics volunteers take a selfie on the beach near the Gangneung Olympic Park in South Korea. The Opening Ceremony for the 2018 Winter Games is one week away. Credit Carl Court/Getty Images

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — Early Friday morning, in a hallway outside the Olympic media dining room, a young woman stocked a long row of shelves with Korean novels translated into a dozen or so languages. The books were free to take or borrow, she said. The Pyeongchang Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games hoped to introduce international visitors to Korean literature and other aspects of the national culture.

I grabbed “The Hole” by Hye-Young Pyun, described on its jacket as “a deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation.” I’ve spent the last 24 hours here in the cold, waiting for the rest of the world to arrive. It seemed fitting.

With one week to go before the opening ceremony, organizers were putting the finishing touches on the event sites for the 2018 Winter Games. On Friday, the facilities were just beginning to come to life. Local volunteers and staff members — wearing red and gray jumpsuits and moving tentatively in packs — outnumbered the athletes and media members.

Everyone smiled. The facilities were spotless. Everything had that new Olympic smell of recently hung sheet rock and drying spackling paste.

I began my trip on Thursday afternoon at the main train station in Seoul. From there, a new high-speed train zooms to the Olympic cities of Pyeongchang and Gangneung in about two hours. (The roughly 100-mile drive takes more than three hours.) Near the main entrance to the train station, a pop-up kiosk was overstuffed with fresh merchandise — including official Olympic fidget spinners and packs of beef jerky, in flavors like Cheese, Almond and MangoBerry — drawing curious passers-by. Olympic advertisements featuring Yuna Kim, the former figure skater, towered over the crowded hall.

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