Seoul: Even though the two Koreas are technically still at war and have had decades of heated sports rivalry, they agreed on Wednesday to form the first joint Olympic team.
Senior sports officials from North and South Korea agreed on Tuesday in Macau to compete as a single team for the first time at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha and then to field a single Korean team at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
"The significance of this is we will be going onto the world stage as a unified team, and this will serve as a symbol of reconciliation and cooperation," a South Korean Unification Ministry official said.
Some of the more emotional recent moments at Olympics have been when North and South Korean athletes held hands and marched under one flag at the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Games in 2000 and Athens in 2004.
They later competed for their own countries.
A South Korean Olympic committee official acknowledged on Tuesday that there was a mountain of issues to be worked out before the two Koreas can compete as a single team.
Working level officials will be meeting in the North Korean city of Kaesong in December to begin working out details on how to form a joint team, Olympic official Baek Sung-il said.
One of the key issues for the talks will be if a joint team will seek to have parity in its balance of athletes from the two Koreas or if it will produce the most competitive team possible.
South Korea, with a larger population and better-funded sports associations, has more world-class athletes than North Korea.
In Athens, South Korea produced 30 medals, including nine golds, while North Korea tallied five in total and no golds.
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