Abstract
Has sports nationalism policy moved South Korea’s cultural ecosystem backward? South Korea’s sports nationalism policy began in the 1960s with an aim to restore its tarnished national pride. With the government’s full support, the policy served as momentum to lay South Korea’s unique institutional foundation to grow into a sports powerhouse, resulting in the enactment of the National Sports Promotion Act, opening of the national team training camp, provision of pensions to national athletes, operation of school sports teams, and creation of the National Youth Sports Festival. The sports nationalism policy created a culture that forces students to set their career paths in a dichotomous way: select ‘studies’ or ‘elite athletics’ rather than nurture ‘athletes who study’. As a result, school sports teams have increasingly become a means to produce ‘exercising machines’ not part of education, thereby generating a deformed elite sports structure. Though sports nationalism policy has obviously caused an imbalance in sports culture by inducing its growth around elite sports, it has also created a positive legacy, such as enhancing South Korea’s national pride and brand value by raising its sports to a world-class level in a short period of time.
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