The 2018 Olympics have suffered, like so many Olympics, from corruption.

The country is hosting its first Winter Games amid a national reckoning about big business, politics and the tentacles of influence that link them. Calls for a cleanup intensified this week after the heir apparent at Samsung, a top-tier Olympic sponsor, was freed from prison by a court ruling that reduced and suspended his sentence for bribery.
The Pyeongchang Games themselves stand as a symbol of the cozy ties between South Korea’s government and Samsung, its most powerful conglomerate. The company’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, is a longtime member of the International Olympic Committee and lobbied for years behind the scenes to bring the Winter Games to South Korea. The government saw Mr. Lee as so pivotal to its Olympic dreams that after he was convicted of tax evasion in 2008, the country’s president then pardoned him expressly so he could resume lobbying for Pyeongchang. ...

In South Korea, the recent atmosphere of scandal has made it an especially awkward time for the country’s leading corporate names to be plastering Olympic venues with logos and showering athletes with freebies. The corruption allegations that ensnared Mr. Lee’s son and heir — and that last year felled Park Geun-hye, then South Korea’s president — involved bribery via sports sponsorships.
“The zeitgeist is calling for chaebol reform,” said Sun Dae-in, director of research at SDInomics, a think tank in Seoul, the capital, using the Korean term for the family-run business empires. “That puts the chaebol in a very sensitive position.” One result: Korean companies, fearful that their contributions would be “misinterpreted,” were skittish for a long time about sponsoring the Pyeongchang Games, said Chang Sea-jin, a professor at the National University of Singapore. Last April, when members of the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee met with South Korea’s finance minister to discuss the committee’s financial troubles, its chairman said that the bribery scandal was one reason organizers were having difficulty attracting corporate sponsorships, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The committee finished raising the $875 million in sponsorship money it needed only after President Moon Jae-in called on government companies, including the state electric utility, to pitch in. ...

For many South Koreans, conflicted feelings toward the nation’s business champions have already dampened the Olympic spirit. ...

A backlash against big business has been a long time coming in South Korea. For decades governments have tolerated lawbreaking tycoons so long as their companies bolstered the nation’s economic might — or, in the case of the Olympics, the nation’s global prestige. Three leaders of Pyeongchang’s winning campaign to host the Winter Games were industrialists who had, at one point or another, been convicted of financial crimes: Mr. Lee of Samsung, Cho Yang-ho of Korean Air and Park Yong-sung, formerly of the Doosan conglomerate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/b...uth-korea.html