Thursday, August 21, 2008

Olympic Taekwondo Musings

I've been catching a lot of the TKD coverage on my computer in my home office. We've had other Olympic coverage going on at the same time in the family room. I've been trying to figure out why this isn't being broadcast on a TV channel here in the US considering the rise in popularity of mixed martial arts. I also believe that Taekwondo is the most popular of all the martial arts. Yeah....I have no facts to back my belief up. Personal experience only. In the town I live in, there are 3 separate Taekwondo dojangs out of 6 martial arts studios.

My reasons:
  1. The "scream". Seriously. You can hear it all through the house. That high-pitched whine of a scream is really annoying. Most noticable with the women obviously. My wife thought I was killing kittens (and no....I don't mean that euphemism!) in the office. Everyone should switch to real yells instead. Maybe that isn't in the spirit of old martial arts movies but who screams like that in real life?
  2. Non-obvious scoring. Sports need to be non-subjective and this is obviously a subjective scoring system. They need to fix it somehow.
  3. Korean terms. As Americans, we have the "if isn't English, we don't like it" mentality. Yeah, it's narrow minded but it isn't going to change. It's hard to understand what the referee is saying. I don't want to change the culture of the sport so I think that subtitles on the referee would be ideal. Considering he doesn't say that many different things, it would be easy to just implement a preset of terms on a video screen controlled by the touch of a button.
  4. The warnings. Warnings are given but the audience is left wondering what happened.
  5. More action. Too much defensive bouncing.
  6. Media coverage. Our local news sports does the "don't pay attention to what we're about to say and we'll tell you what happened" in the evening news. Taekwondo wasn't even mentioned even though there were medals won by Americans.

1 comment:

Bil Repenning said...

The question is, what is TKD? Is it a sport or is it a martial art?