The two Koreas will field a combined team at the table tennis team world championships after the nations decided not to compete against each other in the quarter-finals, the International Table Tennis Federation said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
North and South Korea requested to field a unified team for the semi-finals of the championships, which will be played against Japan or Ukraine on Friday in Halmstad, Sweden.<\/p>\n
The last time that a unified Korea team played the world table tennis championships was 1991 in Chiba, Japan where women’s team shocked defending champions China to win the gold medal.<\/p>\n
The decision to form a unified team was a tripartite agreement between the leaders North and South Korean Table Tennis teams and the ITTF.<\/p>\n
“When I informed the Board of Directors about this development, the unified team received a standing ovation from the delegates who showed their sign of support to this historic move,” ITTF president Thomas Weikert said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The move follows the North and South Korean leaders’ pledge to work for “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula last week.<\/p>\n
The Koreas had earlier this year joined forces to field a combined women’s ice hockey team at the Pyeongchang Winter Games after they marched in together for the opening ceremony<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The two Koreas will field a combined team at the table tennis team world championships after the nations decided not to compete against each other in the quarter-finals, the International Table Tennis Federation said on Thursday. North and South Korea requested to field a unified team for the semi-finals of the championships, which will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30136,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30137,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30135\/revisions\/30137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}