TKD News June 2012

Dallas, TX 2012 National Junior Olympics.
Well, this year was full of disappointment, not with the performance but with the judging at the competition, this years competition was judged by, for lack of a better word, "incompetents" when you have competitors that does not even know the proper setups for each move in poomsae winning simply because they had more power, that is a problem, when USAT changed the way judging is made this year from the WTF Sports Poomsae point system individually to having a pair of competitor go up at the same time and the judges simply raising their hands to say who they "think" is better, for the sake of "expediting" the match, because there are "too many" competitors (a problem they had created themselves by qualifying anyone that showed up at qualifier, someone can trip, fall flat on their face and STILL qualify to nationals, such a joke) some people might say " so what's the difference? well, the difference is in doing a point system the judges need to know what they're scoring, they themselves need to be properly trained in what to look for, technique, power, speed, setups etc, when the judges know what to look for, if there's 5 judges, their score would be fairly close to each other, but if the judges have no clue as to what to really look for? their score will be all over the place one would score perhaps a 6.0 another maybe 8.3, the disparity will be so much that it will be very obvious that they are not qualified to judge, on the other hand, the reason why they used the hand raising system to determine the winner is that it's not obvious when a judge is incompetent or unqualified.
Unfortunately this year, we have seen so many Poomsae athlete that were consistently Gold or Silver medalist at US Open and other major tournament not even placing at Nationals, because this years judges were only looking for plain power, not proper techniques. (typical of judges that really don't know much about proper techniques) Riann was I guess "Lucky" to have gotten Bronze this year.