“Faker” Lee Sang-hyeok has been awarded the Cheongnyong (Blue Dragon) Medal (First Class), the highest grade of South Korea’s Order of Sports Merit. This is the first time in history that an esports athlete has received the government’s top-tier decoration. More than a personal honor, this award is a symbolic event that signals esports has shed the “game” label and has taken root within the officially recognized category of “sports.”

From its earliest days, Korea’s esports industry has longed to enter the institutional mainstream. There were scattered attempts in the past—such as the founding of the Air Force ACE (Airforce Challenge E-sports) professional team—but the scene rose and fell amid a lack of structural foundations and various controversies. The Korea e-Sports Association (KeSPA) also consistently pursued full membership in the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee (KSOC), yet the barriers within the traditional sports establishment were formidable.

During the 2018 National Assembly audit, then-KSOC President Lee Kee-heung drew a clear line, stating, “Esports is closer to games than to sports.” Later, in 2021, he stepped back slightly, saying that “the global trend views esports as sports,” but this was merely a cautious stance shaped by international circumstances; a fundamental shift in how the sports establishment perceived esports remained a distant prospect.

The situation has now changed. External justification has been firmly established: esports’ adoption as an official event at the Hangzhou Asian Games and the subsequent gold-medal win, along with the launch of the IOC-led Olympic Esports Games. Domestically, the winds also shifted when the esports-friendly Ryu Seung-min, formerly head of the Korea Table Tennis Association, was elected as the new KSOC president. Ryu previously served as a promotional ambassador for KeSPA, and during his campaign he put forward a pledge to make esports an official event of the Korean National Sports Festival.

This Cheongnyong Medal award is the result of these broader currents of the times converging with Lee Sang-hyeok’s stature as an athlete, alongside the government’s policy will.

Some observers speculated that Lee received the Cheongnyong Medal simply because he reached the 1,500-point threshold used as a benchmark for conferring the decoration. However, reporting confirms that this award was not an automatic conferment based on a purely quantitative points system. While the Asian Games gold medal is reflected in the points, his record of six League of Legends World Championship (“Worlds”) titles could not be readily plugged into the existing points-calculation framework used for elite sports—largely because Worlds is a tournament hosted by the title’s publisher (Riot Games), making it a special case.

Accordingly, this award strongly bears the character of an “exceptional conferment,” decided through recommendations from the relevant ministries, deliberation by the State Council, and final approval by the President. What stands out here is the type of decoration itself. If the government had confined esports to the realm of entertainment or the cultural industries alone, it would have been more fitting to confer an Order of Cultural Merit rather than a sports decoration.

Instead, the government chose the Cheongnyong Medal—the highest grade within the Order of Sports Merit. This can be read as more than a stance of “games are not an addictive substance”; it is effectively an official government affirmation of the proposition, “Esports is sport.”

This may sound like a somewhat lighthearted analogy, but from here on out, whenever the tired old argument resurfaces—asking whether esports is truly sport—there will be no need for long explanations. A single sentence will suffice: “Faker received the Cheongnyong Medal.” That is how profound the meaning of Lee Sang-hyeok’s Cheongnyong Medal truly is.

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.