In Olympic Infighting, the Koreas Take the Gold HONG KONG - Their bilateral relationship is in enough disrepair that North and South Korea will not be marching together three weeks hence, during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Summer Games in London. They've done it before, though. The crowds at Olympic Stadium roared their approval when the two teams marched together under a blue-and-white flag to open the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. It was the first time they had joined together since before the Korean War started, when they competed as a single nation at the 1948 Games, also held in London. The two Koreas again marched together in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, and at the 2006 Asian Games. The bilateral buzzkill came at the Beijing Games in 2008, when diplomatic relations had grown tense over the shooting of a South Korean tourist at a resort area in the North earlier that summer. "The North Koreans demanded that they not have to march directly behind the South Koreans," the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. That forced the Beijing organizers to rearrange the delegations so that Fiji, Cameroon and Montenegro came in between. All that happened under the late dictator Kim Jong-il. His son Kim Jong-un is now in charge, but there has been no sign of any political or Olympic thaw. The North keeps launching missiles, reneging on diplomatic bargains and threatening to start a war that will turn the South into a sea of fire. The usual. Still, the North has pledged that its military will not misbehave during the period of the Games - the quadrennial Olympic Truce that has been signed by 193 nations. And the country is definitely sending athletes to London - no more boycotts like Los Angeles (1984) and Seoul (1988). North Korea's official news agency said 49 athletes would compete in London, 35 women and 14 men. The North Korean men's soccer team did not qualify for London. And after their 7-0 humiliation by Portugal in the 2010 World Cup, the team members might well be mining bauxite or quarrying limestone in some North Korean labor camp. It's no joke: Lee Chang-soo, a former North Korean judo champion, has spoken about his loss to a South Korean judoka in 1990. As punishment, he said, he was sent to work in a coal mine. He defected at a tournament in Spain the following year. Mr. Lee now lives in South Korea, where he's training his three teenage sons to some day inflict judo revenge on the North. The plucky North Korean women's soccer team is grouped with the United States, the defending Olympic champions. Play begins three weeks from Wednesday, two days before the Games officially open on July 27. (The American women start off with the French, and the North Koreans take on Colombia. Both those matches are in Glasgow.) Overall, North Korea won two gold medals, a silver and a bronze in Beijing, and in London it figures to do best in weightlifting and wrestling. A female lifter, Pak Hyon-suk, won the gold in Beijing on her final lift, and the gymnast Hong Un-jong won the vault. Videos of those performances are here. North Korean gymnasts - men, women and rhythmic - will not be competing in London. The international gymnastics federation hit the North with a two-year ban for falsifying the age of Hong Su-jong, the sister of the Beijing gold medalist. Team officials had assigned her three different birthdates over the course of seven years. Tania Branigan recently examined the North's Olympic prospects in The Guardian, and she interviewed Brian Myers, associate professor at Dongseo University in South Korea and author of "The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters." She reported that Mr. Myers said sport has never been integral to North Korea's political or cultural ideology, not in the way it was for the Soviet Union and its satellites. "It is not a huge problem for them if they are not capable of winning gold medals in various disciplines," Mr. Myers said of the North Koreans. If they get a few they will chalk that up to their unique moral strength and the athletes will thank the leader for inspiring them.