2018 Winter Olympics participant South Korea at the 2018 Winter Olympics
The 2018 Winter Olympics (Korean: 2018년 동계 올림픽, romanized: Icheon sip-pal nyeon Donggye Ollimpik), officially the XXIII Olympic Winter Games (French: Les XXIIIes Jeux olympiques d'hiver; Korean: 제23회 동계 올림픽, romanized: Jeisipsamhoe Donggye Ollimpik) and also known as PyeongChang 2018 (Korean: 평창2018, romanized: Pyeongchang Icheon sip-pal), were an international winter multi-sport event held between 9 and 25 February 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, with the opening rounds for certain events held on 8 February, a day before the opening ceremony.
Pyeongchang was elected as the host city for the 2018 Winter Games at the 123rd IOC Session in Durban, South Africa in July 2011. This marked the second time that South Korea had hosted the Olympic Games (having previously hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul), as well as the first time it hosted the Winter Olympics. The 2018 Games marked the third time that an Asian country had hosted the Winter Olympics, after Sapporo 1972 and Nagano 1998, both in Japan. It was also the first Winter Olympics held in mainland Asia, and the first of three consecutive Olympic Games held in East Asia, preceding the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan and the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics in China.
The 2018 Games featured 102 events over 15 disciplines, a record number of events for the Winter Games. This is the first edition in Winter Olympic Games history to feature more than 100 medal events, four of which made their Olympic debut in 2018: "big air" snowboarding, mass start speed skating, mixed doubles curling, and mixed team alpine skiing. A total of 2,914 athletes from 93 teams competed, with the national debuts of Ecuador, Eritrea, Kosovo, Malaysia, Nigeria and Singapore.
After a state-sponsored doping program was exposed following the 2014 Winter Olympics, the Russian Olympic Committee was suspended, but selected athletes were allowed to compete neutrally under the special IOC designation of "Olympic Athletes from Russia" (OAR), provided they could meet certain anti-doping requirements. North Korea agreed to participate in the Games in spite of tense relations with South Korea. The two nations paraded together at the opening ceremony as a unified Korea, and fielded a unified team (COR) in the women's ice hockey.
South Korea ranked seventh overall at the 2018 Winter Games, with five gold medals and 17 overall medals. South Korea has traditionally been a country that won many medals in short track speed skating, but in this competition, it also won medals in skeleton racing, curling and skiing. South Korea's Yun Sung-Bin won a gold medal in men's skeleton racing, the first Olympic gold ever won by Asia in the sledding event. Norway led the total medal tally with 39, followed by Germany at 31 and Canada at 29. Germany and Norway were tied for the highest number of gold medals, both winning 14.