By ETU
18.01.2004
At the WTF World Championships in Jeju the WTF General Assembly was held. Part of the assembly was the decision over new competition rules that should contribute to making Taekwondo fights more spectacular to the audience and the media. This amendment to the existing competition rules includes major changes in achieving valid points and some other changes regarding judging and overall matters of WTF competitions.
Major changes are:
- attacker receives two points for a legal attack to the head
- one point for legal attack to the body
- plus one point in case of a knock down (referee counting)
- only two categories for Kyeonggo and Gamjeom penalty (but same kinds of prohibited acts)
- contest area (inner fighting area) enlarged
- several changes regarding the competition management
Applying the new competition rules will have a major impact on Taekwondo games and techniques. Not only competition mats will have to be redesigned, hardware and software for competition magement will also have to be adapted. This will mean some heavy investment in material for associations and federations in the next year.
New WTF competition rules become effective in July 2002. Before the Euro Championship 2002 in Samsun there was held an International Referee Refresher Course by WTF in Ankara where about 100 international referees took part. They were drilled in using the new hand signals and had intensive lecture about the newly adapted competition rules.
