By Agencies

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Athletes from North and South Korea will not march together in Friday's opening ceremony for the Vancouver winter Olympics, games officials have said.

In a statement on Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee said the two sides had failed to reach an agreement on the format of a unified march.

South Korea has sent 46 athletes to the games, while the North has sent just two – a figure skater and a speed skater.

Korean athletes from North and South first marched together at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

The march followed an historic summit in Pyongyang between the leaders of North and South Korea, seen as the high-point of a thaw in relations between the two countries.

North and South Korean athletes repeated the unified march at the 2004 summer games in Athens and the winter games in Turin, Italy, two years later.

Instead of national flags, they marched behind a flag showing an outline of the entire Korean peninsula.

However, the teams marched separately in the opening of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 as relations between the two deteriorated once again over the North's nuclear programme.

North and South Korea have been divided since the end of the Second World War in 1945.

The two sides fought a bitter three-year war in the 1950s and remain officially at war, never having signed a peace treaty ending the conflict.

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