Korea opens first national sports museum at Olympic Park

The culture ministry said Thursday it is opening South Korea's first national sports museum at Olympic Park in Seoul, a repository for a collection of about 70,000 sports-related items gathered from home and abroad.

The National Sports Museum opens Thursday at the park in Songpa District, with Sports Minister Choe Hwi-yong attending a ceremony alongside about 150 figures from the sports and culture worlds and donors of sports heritage items. Kim Chung-bae is its first director.

Among the headline exhibits are the winner's medal Suh Yun-bok took at the 1947 Boston Marathon, the football boots of Kim Yong-sik, a pioneer of Korean football, the competition uniform of Yang Jung-mo, South Korea's first Olympic gold medalist, and the torch and hoop used at the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

The ministry built the museum together with the Seoul Olympic Memorial National Sports Promotion Foundation and describes it as a base for sports heritage, created to record the history of Korean sports, systematically collect and preserve sports heritage scattered at home and abroad, and use it for exhibitions, education and research.

The building runs from two basement levels to four floors above ground, housing a special exhibition hall, a cafe and lobby on the first floor, permanent exhibition halls on the second and third, a rooftop garden on the fourth, and storage vaults for sports artifacts in the basements. The existing Seoul Olympic Memorial Hall has been renovated to add a children's museum, a sports library and education and hands-on spaces.

To mark the opening, about 200 people will take part in a stamp tour on Oct. 17, following clues to major exhibits and completing tasks. Other programs for general visitors, including a personal record card and a highlight studio, will run alongside it.

"The history of Korean sports is not only the records set by athletes but also the memories of all the people who cheered and celebrated those moments together," Choe said. "I hope the National Sports Museum will establish itself as a space that systematically preserves precious sports heritage and shares the challenges and emotion held within it with the public and future generations."