Korean Fighters Holds Precarious Winner

``The pride of suzerain state was preserved, but…..``

Both Korea`s male and female teams won the title in the 15th World Cup Taekwondo Championships and the 8th World Cup Women`s Taekwondo Championships that have been held for a week at Cheju Island.

For men`s competition, Sidney Olympics gold medallist Kim Kyung-Hoon (Samsung S1) merely earned the bronze medal in middleweight class on last day of tournament, but the Korean team won a 15th consecutive victory with two gold medals and two bronze medals, surpassing France, the United States and Iran with a gold and a bronze by a width of a hair.

However, the Korean team, that had earned over 5 gold medals thus far, realized that it could no longer reign over the world Taekwondo as an absolute winner.

Although the women`s team failed to add a medal this day, it took a 8th consecutive title to finish the tournament with 6 gold medals and 1 silver medal. The Turkish team ranked the second place with 1 gold and 1 bronze.

As the Korean teams won the title, this event brought to a seemingly successful end. But as the appeals to umpire`s decision have been raised successively, many evaluated that the management of this event was not smooth on the whole.

In the quarterfinals of women`s bantamweight class, as Tosun lost to Jung Jae-Eun (Korean National University of Physical Education) by a penalty mark, Turkey team`s coach Lee Hyo-Joo appealed ruthlessly to the Korean officials of the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF), raising the opposition to umpire`s decision on Nov. 1st. Due to such an unpleasant affair, the WTF lost an international credibility following quarrels over the decision in the Sydney Olympics. In a slugfest characteristic of Taekwondo, it is actually very hard to distinguish the valid hit from the invalid hit. However, many experts uniformly point out that the objective standards should be established in order to shirk such a criticism that the umpires have made a judge in favor of the Korean team.

yjongk@donga.com