The Conquerors Won, Thanks To The Conquered

Back home the editor of one of Seoul's largest newspapers defiantly scratched the Rising Sun emblems off photographs of Sohn and Nam, identified them as Korean, and said they had won a great athletic victory for Korea. The Japanese threw the editor in jail and closed down his newspaper.

Sohn Lee Chung, alias Kitei Son, never ran in another Olympics. The Games scheduled in 1940 were canceled because of war. In time that war liberated Sohn's homeland from the Japanese militarists only to put the northern part of it—the part that Sohn himself called home—under the domination of another set of tyrants. Sohn himself settled in the south and became a coach and adviser to a number of South Korean teams traveling all over the world.

He was present in Tokyo at the 1964 Olympics, and there he met an old friend: Il Sun Lee, the schoolteacher who had seen promise in a gangling lad some 35 years before and sent him on to become an Olympic champion. It was not a friendly meeting. Lee by then was the coach of a Communist track team from the North whose athletes withdrew from the Games in anger when the International Olympic Committee said they would have to join forces with the team from the South and compete as a unit.