100 Won Sydney Olympics

North Korea's commemorative coinage program of the 1990s was largely a hard-currency operation — these pieces were struck for export sale, not domestic circulation, at a time when the DPRK was in the grip of a famine that killed an estimated 240,000 to 3.5 million people. The foreign exchange earned from collector coin sales was one of several unconventional revenue streams the regime exploited through that decade.

North Korea was not represented at the 1996 Atlanta Games and sent only a marginal delegation to Sydney in 2000, making the athletic subject matter essentially decorative rather than celebratory.