culture

The Pyongyang General Electric Cable Factory 326 is well-known for both growth in production and vigorous mass sports activities.

The factory is fully equipped with sports facilities.

If you sit in the stand of the football ground covered with artificial turf, you can have a full view of the volleyball, basketball and tennis courts, each of which is flawless in every aspect.

According to Han Kwang Il, chairman of the primary committee of the factory of the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea who is in charge of mass sports activities, volleyball, tennis and other courts have been built in several places of the factory compound covering a wide area.

At lunch and other leisure times, these courts are crowded with people all at once. The “leading players” in matches between workshops and workteams are the employees who have once joined extracurricular sports groups at schools and schoolchildren’s palaces in their childhood. Sports games are played almost every day with them as key players, which serves as a course for all employees to acquire more than one sports technique.

As a result, excellent playing scenes putting professionals to shame are seen in the sports games of the factory held on the occasion of holidays or major anniversaries.

The factory employees fully displayed the sports techniques they had acquired in ordinary days at the Sports Contest of Workers in Major Industrial Sectors-2024 held on May Day last year.

“We, employees of the factory, took part in football and several events of amusement games of the contest on behalf of workers in the machine-building industry sector last year and many spectators enthusiastically cheered us,” said Kim In Chol, a worker of the insulation workshop, proudly.

The Munmyong Health Complex of the factory well known to the whole country also plays an important part in promoting mass sports activities of the factory.

The complex equipped with a dining hall and welfare service amenities has also a swimming pool, physical fitness room and a table-tennis room. Han Hye Song, a caretaker, once won the table-tennis singles of the national mass sports contest and all the employees of the factory are very good at swimming.

According to Han, amateurs play games in groups every month in the table-tennis room of the Munmyong Health Complex, and their level is considerably high.

After finishing their day’s work, the employees of the factory visit the health complex to build up their physical strength as they play games. 

“As they strive to practise their sports techniques, the employees enhance the confidence that nothing is impossible if they are determined and make efforts, and it leads to increased production and technical innovations,” said Chairman Han Kwang Il.