The first scandal at the London Olympics occurred even before the official opening ceremony, on 25 July. In Glasgow, at the Hampden Park stadium, a football match between the DPRK and Colombia was supposed to begin - and the organizers confused the flags.
The incident took place before the start of the women's football match between the DPRK and Colombian national teams. At the ceremony of introducing athletes, the flag of South Korea was placed next to the names of the North Korean footballers. Such a mistake caused indignation among the athletes, they hastily retired from the field to the locker room and refused to play. The representative of the organizing committee apologized to the players, after correcting the erroneous video, the incident was resolved and the girls agreed to the game. The match started 1 hour 5 minutes late. Angry Koreans managed to beat Colombia 2-0 (both goals were scored by Kim Sung-hyu).
Just a few days before the incident, the 2012 Olympic Games Chief Ceremonial Nikki Halifax in London officially issued a statement to ensure that no incidents involving the playing of the wrong anthems and raising the wrong flags were reported. She assured of the high professionalism of the responsible persons in the field of protocol, that experienced standard-bearers of the army, navy and aviation were involved in raising the flags.
The organizers of the games conducted an internal investigation and found out that the video with the presentation of athletes from the DPRK was edited in London and shown unchanged in Glasgow. Thus, the culprits are in the capital, but who exactly prepared the video has not yet been clarified. At the same time, the flag waving at the upper level of the stadium was chosen correctly, they confused the country only in the video.
The organizers of the games had to make an official apology to the DPRK National Committee and assure that this will not happen again. Interestingly, during this statement, the responsible persons confused the names of the countries and instead of "Republic of Korea" and "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" used the unofficial ones: "South" and "North Korea". However, this error was also fixed soon.
The situation is especially unpleasant for athletes from the DPRK, since this country is still officially at war with the Republic of Korea. In 1953, a temporary truce was signed, since then hostilities have ceased, but relations between neighboring countries still remained tense.
