North Korea has agreed to send athletes to the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea, but the Olympics have long been a window into geopolitics between the two sides. This video was made using the fast neural style transfer algorithm, implemented in TensorFlow. The original video was produced by The New York Times and released under the Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode). Entitled, "Can the Olympics Bring North and South Korea Together?," you can watch the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rhdWbRpbnw ==== TRANSCRIPT ==== Escalating brinkmanship, crippling sanctions, intercontinental missile testing. Can the hair-trigger standoff between North and South Korea be defused by figure skating? The 2018 Winter Games will be hosted by North Korea's mortal enemy, about forty miles from their border in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Whether their regime ends up as a participant or a pariah, it will not be the first time the Olympics has been at the center of a geopolitical chess game. Despite a tiny economy and decades of international isolation, North Korea has produced an impressive slate of world-class athletes and won dozens of Olympic medals, from Judo to gynmastics, table tennis, to wrestling. In the early 2000s, the two Koreas, still formally at war, actually marched together in the Olympic ceremonies. This year, even with the global crackdown on the regime, South Korea's President and the International Olympic Committee have been repeatedly to attend the so-called "games of peace." To fully understand the global push to get North Korea to compete, you'd need to rewind to the 1988 Olympics. Seoul was selected as the host city. To North Korea, it was not just a snub but an afront to their national dignity. They demanded, with apparent support from China and the Soviet Union, that the International Olympic Committee allow the North to co-host and move some events across the border. There were two years of secret negotiations and threats. Ten months before the 1988 Games, two agents of the regime placed a bomb on Korean Air flight 858 killing more than one hundred people. The bombers later said the goal was to sabotage the olympics by scaring off attendees. But the games went on as planned and were hailed as a historic success for the South. Meanwhile North Korea, which carried out a feeble boycott after being abandoned by the Soviets and Chinese, was named a state sponsor of terror by the United States. What followed was years of international isolation, crippling hardship and famine, and aggressive nuclear ambitions. There have been periods of calm. The North occasionally sent teams to international competitions in the South. In 1991, the two Koreas actually united to play as a single team in youth soccer and tabletop tennis tournaments. But the North notoriously lashed out again when the South was hosting the World Cup in 2002. During the final set of matches, two boats from the North opened fire on a South Korean patrol ship, triggering a gun battle that killed and injured dozens of sailors on both sides. It was the last major international sports competition held in South Korea. Today, the threat posed by North Korea has been intensifying, but diplomacy has found a place on the playing field. There were the North and South gynmasts in Rio, the cross-border women's soccer and hockey last spring, the tae kwon do exchange in June, and then there was a pair of figure skaters from North Korea, who in September won worldwide fans and qualified to compete in the Olympics, skating to a Beetles song. But it remains to be seen whether the games can offer a diplomatic off-ramp for the standoff, or even a brief reprieve for a whirl around the rink. ==================== Follow me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/VikingPenguinYT