HONG KONG — Wherever they are held, the Olympics are a chance for big-name local sponsors to show home-country pride, associate their brands with athletic values and splash their logos before millions of eyeballs.

This month in South Korea is set to be different.

The country is hosting its first Winter Games amid a national reckoning about big business, politics and the tentacles of influence that link them. Calls for a cleanup intensified this week after the heir apparent at Samsung, a top-tier Olympic sponsor, was freed from prison by a court ruling that reduced and suspended his sentence for bribery.

The Pyeongchang Games themselves stand as a symbol of the cozy ties between South Korea’s government and Samsung, its most powerful conglomerate.

The company’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, is a longtime member of the International Olympic Committee and lobbied for years behind the scenes to bring the Winter Games to South Korea. The government saw Mr. Lee as so pivotal to its Olympic dreams that after he was convicted of tax evasion in 2008, the country’s president then pardoned him expressly so he could resume lobbying for Pyeongchang.