Taekwondo

Quadruple Olympic Points

Taekwondo competition at the European Games will be held in the knockout system in eight women’s and eight men’s weight categories. The knockout system provides for two bronze medals, which will be awarded to both players defeated in the semi-finals. But the fight will be fought not only for the medals of the European Games. During the tournament, it will be possible to earn four (the highest possible) number of points for  the Olympic Taekwondo ranking. And it is this ranking that will select the participants of the 2024 Olympic Games next year.

The struggle of taekwondo competitors will be possible to observe in Krynica-Zdrój, and 256 athletes will take part in the competition. The first day of fighting is scheduled for June 23, with the tournament ending four days later.

Combat and Science

Taekwondo is a combat sport originating in Korea. Taekwondo was created for military purposes, but in the second half of the 20th century it gained worldwide popularity. From 2021, it is officially included in the program of the Olympic Games. Taekwondo is an extremely spectacular sport. It was developed in Korea in the 1940s and 1950s. It is a combination of many other combat sports and a bold approach to biomechanics and Newtonian physics.

The origin and development of the discipline are related to one person. Born in 1918, Korean Choi Hong-hi trained in martial arts as a teenager. The outbreak of World War II found him in Japan, where he was training karate. He was conscripted into the Japanese army and sent on a mission to Korea, and after the end of the war he organized the independence movement, for which he was imprisoned for seven years. To kill boredom, he trained alone in a martial arts cell, and after 1945 he was drafted into the Korean army.

In the 1950s, he intensified his studies of the new discipline. He appointed a team of experts who supported him in this work. The result of these efforts was the theory of power, which consists of six points. It focuses on reaction strength, concentration, balance, breath control, speed and mass. It turned out that even in combat sports, some things can be assessed using Newton’s laws of motion. And thus taekwondo was born.