One single point can decide a fight. It can make a dream come true and it can end a player’s career. In theory, a point is important. But in our actual fights, this is not the case. A point more or less in the first round makes no difference as there are two more rounds to follow.

In the second or third round, when there is already a point gap, a single point will not turn around the outcome of the fight. The result can be anticipated and spectators lose interest. So in reality a point is of little value. The player needs skill and courage to bring home a hit but the audience often does not appreciate it. Due to this, many fights lack emotion and excitement. The exception is the sudden-death-round. Here, a single point is all the players need and the excitement is great.

A change of our competition rules might be a good idea in order to improve things here. The question is, what to change and how. There is a new set of rules waiting to be used at our next big international tournament. According to these rules, the worth of certain techniques was upgraded. There will be three points for an attack to the head and two for a turning kick to the body. To put these rules into practice, we need highly qualified referees. Even with the rules we had until now, it was fairly common that two referees out of four saw a hit and gave a point and two did not. As there is either a hit or not, 50 percent of the referees were wrong. The blind spot was often used as an explanation for this. But you would expect just one referee in the blind spot, not two. With the new rules our referees have to give one, two or three points according to the technique.

If they miss a head shot, they deprave a fighter of three points at once. If they give three points for a light brush of the head it is equally unfair. And what exactly is a turning kick to the body. A classical dwit chagi probably is. But what happens if the fighter makes a turning step before? Are 45° enough for a turning kick? The electronic body protector can obviously not help here as it cannot recognize turning kicks and head shots. At the same time the new video referee is bound to get a lot of work – with corresponding consequences like delayed matches, uncertain time frames and disappointed fighters and coaches.

Is this good for the audience? If spectators are to be presented with attractive techniques this is better done by taekwondo-demonstrations. In a tournament it is arguable if spectators want to see beautiful techniques or if they rather want to experience exciting, dynamic fights. Spectators want to see who the champion is. The players themselves want to win – not with nice kicks but with effective ones. I was a player myself and I remember very well that my main motivation was to win a fight. If the opponent is weak, then it might be okay to play around and display unusual techniques. If the opponent is strong and the match is important, no player is willing to take a risk for beauty’s sake, especially if he cannot be sure to gain the points for his efforts. Taekwondo is a martial art. It is about power, speed and dynamics – not about complicated techniques that are difficult to referee. For beautiful movements, expressiveness and exact techniques we have our very successful Poomsae tournaments. We will see how it works to give technique marks in full contact taekwondo.

Another problem is that nowadays a player at a big tournament has to fight six, seven or even more times. He wants to save energy and take no risks, especially no risk of injuries. If he leads, he tries to avoid the fight and play for time. For spectators, this is often rather boring. Another thing is that to minimize the risk of injuries, we’ve introduced more and more protectors over the years. We should be careful with that – with protectors everywhere our fighters start to look like robots. What might be a good idea is not more but better protectors. A body protector should be so strong that it prevents injuries but allows hits to have an impact – otherwise our fighters get careless and lose the feeling for the fight. So a protector for heavy weight players should be stronger than for middle or light weight players.

How a new idea like the three-point-rule might solve some of the problems mentioned here is the subject of next month’s edition. Until then, my best wishes and enjoy taekwondo.