Tae Kwon Do Tournament
This weekend I competed in my first Tae Kwon Do tournament, the 2nd Annual Hong-Ik Tae Kwon Do Championship.
This is a local tournament held at Queens College in the Fitzgerald Gym. It was expected to draw about 800 competitors from ages 5 to 50 (or more). I don’t know what the final head-count was.
The way these things work is they divide the competitors into various divisions. The attributes defining each division is basically as follows:
Sex, Age, Belt, Weight
Age is more of a factor when the kids are young and weight when they get older. I’m not still exactly sure how that works. The competitors are also divided into belt categories. These are usually colored, bodan, and black belt. “Bodan” is “almost-black” and the talent pool is not quite as competitive as the black belt division.
The tournament allows you to compete in three events: form, board-breaking, and sparring. Sparring has many rules associated with it but the most important one is no punching to the face. Tae Kwon Do is almost entirely kicks. Face contact is not allows for colored belts but allowed for the black-belt divisions.
I competed in all three events. I competed as a black belt and there were only a half-dozen competitors in my age bracket. It’s hard for guys my age to make it out and train, let alone compete. They usually have families and other interests that soak up their time. Somehow, I keep making the time to train but from what I’m told, I can never expect a great many competitors at these local tournaments.
I won silver in form and gold in breaking.
When it came time to spar, I had a single competitor in my weight-division. I’m about 5 ft. 5 in. and weight about 175lbs. This is definitely on the heavy side. My competitor probably weighed the same but he was an even 6 ft. in height. I won that match without too much trouble. He was kind of slow and I started to get plenty tired as I took advantage of every opening. I think the final score was 12–1 but it’s all a blur.
My second match was against a pretty big guy. You can see him in this picture, he’s the big one in the center (the guy on the left is from my school). The guy I fought had about a lot of weight and height on me but since there was no one in his division, they had me fight him. I was told this was a friendly match, meaning a loss would not count against my win in my own division.
What the hell.
After watching the video, I could plainly see that we were pretty evenly matched. However, I was certainly intimidated and when he back-kicked me in the face (by accident), I lost my will to fight so I bailed on the rest of the fight. Afterwards, once I realized my face wasn’t really pulverized like I thought, I regretted giving him the match. It was my first competition so I’ll check that up to experience.
I still got a gold medal, which felt pretty good. I can’t wait to do this again, hopefully 30lbs lighter!
You can see all of the pictures in my Flickr photo set or slideshow.