Former champions North Korea seek return to glory days after doping ban nadir

MELBOURNE (Agencies): Three-times champions North Korea return from the sidelines at the Women’s Asian Cup on Tuesday hoping a win against Uzbekistan can propel the secretive nation’s previously scandal-hit set-up back towards the top of the regional and global game. The group phase clash in Sydney will be North Korea’s first at the championship since losing in the 2010 final to Australia, a defeat that precipitated more than a decade in the shadows as a result of doping bans, disappointing results and the global pandemic. The tipping point came at the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, when five North Korean players tested positive for prohibited substances, shattering the country’s status among the sport’s elite. Officials attempted to blame the violations on the use of deer musk gland, a traditional Chinese medicine, to treat players who had been struck by lightning, but FIFA banned the team from the 2015 World Cup and the tournament’s preliminaries. That excluded North Korea from the 2014 Women’s Asian Cup and their absence from the tournament stretched for another four years when the team lost out in the 2018 preliminaries to neighbours South Korea by the slenderest of margins.

With the continental championship doubling up as Asia’s qualifier for the Women’s World Cup, that failure meant the North Koreans were kept largely on the sidelines of the senior women’s game until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s reaction to the global shutdown saw travel out of the insular state curtailed until the second half of 2023, ensuring North Korea missed the 2022 edition of the Women’s Asian Cup and the 2023 Women’s World Cup. A team representing the country eventually returned to the international stage at the Asian Games in Hangzhou in September 2023, where they won the silver medal behind Japan to signal the start of North Korea’s on-field revival. The senior team narrowly missed out on a place at the 2024 Olympics, losing over two legs to Japan in a playoff, but the country’s youth teams have been dominating at the global level. North Korea won the Women’s Under-17 World Cup in 2024 and 2025 as well as the 2024 Women’s Under-20 World Cup, ensuring a steady stream of talent will flow into a senior team that has since returned to the top 10 in the FIFA rankings. Forward Choe Il Son, top scorer at 2025’s Under-20 World Cup, has already graduated to the senior squad alongside 19-year-old Hwang Yu-yong as the North Koreans attempt to make up for their lost decade-and-a-half.