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“As well as fighting, what I’m trying to do is change the landscape of MMA in China,” Li tells Sixth Tone. “Little by little, step by step, I’m letting people know what I know.”

Now ranked 12th in his division in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — the highest rank achieved by a male Chinese athlete in the promotion — the welterweight born in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has emerged as a star with real clout in China.

The charismatic fighter has acquired millions of followers on social media, appeared on TV talent shows, and even performed with rock bands. And he’s using this platform with one goal in mind: to inspire a new generation of Chinese mixed martial artists.

Li’s feeds are filled with training videos explaining MMA and encouraging people to try it out. Each Saturday, he’s in a park near his Beijing home, running free sparring classes for local children.

“Martial arts is rooted in our culture,” Li says. “I’m giving these kids a basic understanding of martial arts, and of mixed martial arts. I’ve committed myself to this and being seen in public is part of that. It’s spreading the message.”

Li is part of a rising generation of Chinese fighters reshaping the UFC. They’re not only bringing legions of new fans to the sport, but also forging links between the worlds of MMA and Chinese martial arts that could turn China into a leading producer of fighting talent over the next few years.

MMA is often considered the world’s fastest-growing sport. Emerging in the early ’90s, it sees fighters compete using a mix of different combat skills, with techniques drawn from the likes of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, wrestling, and muay thai.

But until relatively recently, MMA and its most famous franchise — the UFC — had barely made a dent in the Chinese market. Despite the country’s rich martial arts history and huge grassroots participation in combat sports, few Chinese fighters had heard of the UFC just a decade ago — let alone aspired to compete in it.

Zhang Tiequan celebrates after defeating Jason Reinhardt of the USA during their featherweight bout at UFC 127 in Sydney, Australia, Feb. 27, 2011. Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/People Visual

That’s changing dramatically, however, as a handful of Chinese athletes start to find success in the octagon. The first UFC bout featuring a Chinese fighter came on Feb. 27, 2011, with Zhang Tiequan defeating the American featherweight Jason Reinhardt at UFC 127 in Australia.

Today, China has 12 fighters competing in the UFC, and it even has its first world champion: Zhang Weili, who claimed the women’s strawweight title in 2019. Like Li, the 30-year-old Zhang — who isn’t related to Zhang Tiequan — sees herself as a role model for young Chinese athletes and encourages them to follow the path she has forged in life through her dedication to martial arts.

“Years ago, a UFC championship looked far off in the distance for China,” Zhang Weili said ahead of her most recent title defense, an epic split-decision victory over Poland’s Joanna Jędrzejczyk in Las Vegas last March. “Now, we have it, and I hope I can give Chinese fighters more motivation to fight.”

Zhang Weili’s breakout victories have helped the UFC rapidly emerge as one of China’s most popular sports franchises. In 2020, the promotion’s following on China’s Twitter-like Weibo grew nearly 40% to just under 2.2 million, while on Douyin — China’s version of TikTok — it jumped 157% to 7.1 million, according to figures supplied by the UFC.

Zhang Weili celebrates following her split-decision victory over Joanna Jedrzejczyk of Poland in their UFC strawweight championship fight during the UFC 248 event in Las Vegas, USA, March 7, 2020. Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/People Visual

“Chinese fighters are having a huge impact on getting the UFC into the mainstream,” Kevin Chang, senior vice president of the UFC’s Asia-Pacific operation, tells Sixth Tone. “It’s not just Zhang Weili, it’s extending into up-and-coming athletes and our veterans. All of them are trending.”

As its fan base in China grows, the UFC is increasingly looking to the country to expand its roster of fighters. The promotion itself is investing heavily to develop Chinese talent, opening a $13 million performance institute in Shanghai in 2019, where 40 top young athletes are currently training.

A number of people inside China’s MMA scene, meanwhile, tell Sixth Tone the UFC’s growing profile is attracting more young athletes to take up the sport. “The Leech” knows firsthand how important this shift could be.

As a child growing up in the Xinjiang countryside, Li started off as a wrestler and was even offered a wrestling scholarship by a local sports academy. But watching his first MMA event on television in 2008 “changed everything,” he says, convincing him to move to Beijing and try to make it as a pro fighter.

“In my generation, if a person said, ‘I want to be an MMA athlete,’ there were a lot of critics — in society, among your family and friends,” Li says. “They just didn’t know what it was. I was very lucky, because my parents supported me … But now, there’s more attention on MMA than on any other combat sport in China.”

Yi Xiemu is one of the young hopefuls hoping to become China’s next UFC star. The 16-year-old trains at the Enbo Fight Club — a gym in the southwestern city of Chengdu that hosts around 400 fighters, some of them local orphans.

“I like MMA because it’s so powerful,” says Yi, who grew up in Aba Prefecture, a remote area northwest of Chengdu. “Training is very tiring, but I can persist … I’ve learned that in MMA, you have to continue training, keep fighting no matter what.”

At Enbo, Yi benefits from training every day with UFC professional Su Mudaerji. The 25-year-old flyweight, currently ranked 14th in his division, has been in the club since he was a boy and now plays an important role mentoring its junior members.

“I want to show them what’s possible if you work hard enough,” Su, also an Aba Prefecture native, tells Sixth Tone.

Su Mudaerji (right) punches Zarrukh Adashev of Uzbekistan during their flyweight bout at the UFC Fight Night event in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 20, 2021. Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC

Zhang Tiequan, China’s first UFC fighter, is also using his experience to welcome a new generation of fighters. Since hanging up his gloves in 2012, the now-42-year-old has become a driving force behind China Top Team —one of the country’s leading MMA gyms. As a coach at the Beijing-based facility, he’s already helped chart the rise of Li, as well as the surging talent Yan Xiaonan, UFC’s third-ranked women’s strawweight.

Chinese gyms have a natural head start when it comes to training world-class fighters, according to Zhang Tiequan. Unlike in other countries, where fighters normally transition from wrestling or jiu-jitsu to MMA, many Chinese youngsters start out training in kungfu or sanda — a native form of kickboxing that also incorporates wrestling and foot sweep techniques. Zhang followed this route himself, and he believes the wider range of skills he honed through sanda gave him an edge in the cage.

“I started as a wrestler, then I was introduced to sanda,” says Zhang. “I could box, I could kick, I could wrestle. I think this sport gives Chinese fighters an advantage when it comes to MMA and the UFC because of those skills.”

Song Yadong, the UFC’s 14th-ranked bantamweight, echoes this sentiment. His fighting career began at just 9 years old, when he convinced his parents to let him train at one of the famed kungfu schools surrounding the Shaolin Temple in Central China. From there, he transitioned into sanda, then began training with Chengdu’s Enbo Fight Club, before completing his MMA apprenticeship under the tutelage of UFC Hall of Famer Urijah Faber in California.

Students practice open hand strikes at the Shaolin Yongzhi Kungfu School in Dengfeng, Henan province. Courtesy of Matthew Scott

“Those kungfu skills I learned when I was 9 made me even more talented when I was practicing mixed martial arts,” Song tells Sixth Tone. “Chinese martial arts inspired me and taught me to mix the static with the dynamic, to understand that things can be true and false, and to fight with a capricious style.”

To many in China’s MMA circles, Song’s journey from Shaolin to UFC success is a blueprint for the future. Joe Qiao Bo, a veteran MMA coach and ambassador for the sport in China, says the country’s martial arts schools are filled with young fighters with the potential to become pro MMA fighters.

“There are a lot of young people getting into MMA, but the real numbers — the real giant pool of fighters — is still not activated,” says Qiao. “The real numbers are still in martial arts schools.”

In the area around the Shaolin Temple alone, there are scores of martial arts venues, some of them housing as many as 40,000 teenage students. Qiao, who also serves as a consultant for the MMA department of the Chinese Boxing Federation, spends much of his time in the region, working to deepen ties between the schools and the fledgling MMA movement.

“We are trying to activate that connection,” he says. “They (the students in Shaolin) are teenagers, and now is the perfect time to introduce them to MMA.”

Joe Qiao Bo visits the Shaolin Yongzhi Kungfu School in Dengfeng, Henan province, 2019. Courtesy of Matthew Scott

Wang Zhan, a coach at the Enbo Fight Club, has already noticed an uptick in the number of kids arriving in Chengdu from Shaolin, wanting to learn the new sport.

“In the past three years, many people have been joining,” says Wang. “The UFC has indeed improved everyone’s knowledge of MMA in China … There are many fighters like Song Yadong.”

Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing effort to build up MMA as an amateur sport in China, ensuring young fighters have more opportunities to develop before turning pro.

As elsewhere, MMA was for professionals only in China until just a few years ago. But in 2012, the International Mixed Martial Arts Federation (IMMAF) was set up to turn MMA into a globally recognized amateur sport. One day, the goal is for MMA to be accepted as an Olympic event.

The IMMAF and the Chinese Boxing Federation have begun organizing amateur competitions and promoting coaching programs in China. Chinese fighters also regularly compete in the IMMAF’s global competitions, with Han Guangmei the current women’s world bantamweight champion.

Qiao, who coordinates the work of the Chinese and international bodies, views these initiatives as vital to getting the sport on more sustainable footing.“We need to build a pathway for the fighters,” he says. “We need to push this toward the Olympics, like other combat sports.”

If these efforts pay off, China may once more emerge as a global center for combat sports. According to Qiao, if Chinese fighters dig deep enough into the country’s martial arts heritage, they could even show the UFC a new way to fight.

“In MMA right now, people will either strike or they’ll do grappling,” he says. “But the beauty of real kungfu lies in the middle. How do you put your opponent off balance, and then strike? There is an element of this tripping in kungfu that no one is using in MMA. I call this the missing link. That’s what we’re working on now.”

Editor: Dominic Morgan.

(Header image: Li Jingliang reacts after his knockout victory over Santiago Ponzinibbio of Argentina in a welterweight bout during the UFC Fight Night event in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 17, 2021. Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/People Visual)

Original Article:

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006856/the-ufc-stars-kicking-chinese-martial-arts-into-a-new-era

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There is a scene in the hit Japanese anime TV series “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba ” in which the demon slaying mentor, Sabito, tells the hero, Tanjiro, that he is failing to learn his craft properly because “your body doesn’t understand anything.”

Sabito’s jibe echoes the Zen master D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), who once said that “When the ultimate perfection is attained, the body and limbs perform by themselves what is assigned to them to do with no interference from the mind.”

Ultimately, Tanjiro achieves the necessary level of skill through intense and relentless sword fights with Sabito, who “beats the lessons into the marrow of his bones.” The only way to learn, Sabito says, is to train as if one’s life depends on it. Eventually, Tanjiro cuts through a giant boulder with his blade and becomes a fully-fledged Demon Slayer.

When I moved to Japan, I studied the martial art of aikido as a way of learning Japanese culture. After about six months, I grew frustrated because the sensei never taught us anything. He would demonstrate moves and we would practice them repeatedly, but there was no actual instruction.

I had studied some aikido in the U.S., where the American sensei would break each move down into discrete steps and explain the technique required for each. I could not understand Japanese-style intuitive learning. When I asked my Japanese sensei about this, he calmly replied that I should not think of the mind and body as separate. Instead, we should learn through both. Although this method took time, the lessons were ingrained much more deeply.

A poster for the popular Japanese animated movie “Demon Slayer” is displayed at a theater in Tokyo in October 2020. (Photo by Shihoko Nakaoka).

This experiential teaching technique is not confined to martial arts. The daughter of a Japanese friend joined a tennis club at her school and did not pick up a racket for a year. As a linear thinker, my expectation was that swinging a tennis racket and receiving instruction was the best way to learn. But at this tennis club the beginner students spent their first year picking up balls and observing experienced players.

This is similar to the experience of traditional sushi chefs, who may work for 10 years before they slice a fish. In the West, 10,000 hours of practice is widely regarded as sufficient to gain mastery of a subject. But trainee sushi chefs work for around 20,000 hours, slicing vegetables, making rice, cleaning up and observing a master chef before they even begin to serve customers.

This reflects the discipline, commitment, and focus on mindfulness and experiential learning that underscore the high level of craftsmanship in Japanese society.

The American movie “The Karate Kid” (1984) provides a great example of Japanese-style intuitive learning. Miyagi, the teacher, laughs when his student Daniel tells him he is learning karate from a book — because this would be only intellectual learning. Instead, the teacher makes Daniel perform repeated manual tasks such as painting fences or sanding floors.

A scene from the 1984 film “The Karate Kid.” The character Daniel, right, had to do a lot of painting and sanding before he was allowed to throw a punch at his sensei.   © Getty Images

These teach Daniel important defensive blocking techniques in karate, which he learns through his body as well as his mind. Miyagi never tells Daniel why he is doing these chores. As an American, Daniel is quite angry until Miyagi explains to him what he has learned.

Daniel’s experience was echoed in the 1980 movie, “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” when the Jedi Knight Yoda tells Luke Skywalker that a Jedi should use the Force only for knowledge and defense, never for attack. Luke asks, “But tell me why I can’t … ?” But Yoda cuts him off, saying: “No, no, there is no ‘why.’ … Clear your mind of questions.”

Luke was trying to understand cognitively what needed to be understood intuitively. This also chimes with the approach to learning championed by Suzuki, who once said that “Zen upholds intuition against intellectualism, for intuition is the more direct way of reaching the truth.”

Japanese intuitive learning is difficult to grasp at first for linear-thinking Westerners. But a good way to understand this Japanese concept of learning through experience lies in a classic quote from the 17th century haiku master Matsuo Basho, who wrote: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”

Seventeenth century Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho once wrote: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”    © Getty Images

I may never become a Demon Slayer, or even an accomplished aikido practitioner, but I have gained useful insights from my exposure to Japanese intuitive learning, and have come to appreciate the emphasis in Japanese culture on the pursuit of excellence and learning by doing.

Experiential learning requires clearing the mind and remaining aware of every experience. This practice of developing mindfulness also serves as a wonderful antidote to the technological devices and distractions of the modern world, and I have learned to find clarity of thought and gain insights into difficult issues by relying on my inner voice as much as on my analytical thinking.

Author: Richard Conrad is based in Japan and is the author of “Culture Hacks — Deciphering Differences in American, Chinese, and Japanese Thinking.”

Original Article:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Tea-Leaves/Life-lessons-from-anime-and-martial-arts

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Since last October, 20 boys aged between 13 and 17 years have been practicing taekwondo three times a week as part of their curriculum.

Olympian and European champion Leonardo Basile was appointed by FITA to coach the students.

It is believed to be the first time such a course has been held in the seminary.

Following a taekwondo exam held last week, four students achieved green-belt level, with the remaining earning yellow belts.

Mos Melchor Sanchez, the Vatican’s head of culture and sport, said: “Dear FITA President, this is a small miracle in the time of the pandemic.

“Thanks to you and FITA and our dear World Taekwondo President Chungwon Choue.”

World Taekwondo said it had developed a close relationship with the Vatican in recent years through the shared commitment to promoting peace.

Choue added: “A taekwondo association will be established in the Vatican someday and join as a member of World Taekwondo.”

In 2017, Choue awarded Pope Francis an honorary 10th-dan black belt during a meeting in St Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

Choue was accompanied by the FITA President Angelo Cito.

A year later, the World Taekwondo demonstration team performed in the presence of Pope Francis in Vatican City, which was aimed to send out a message of peace through taekwondo.

Original article:

https://www.insidethegames.biz/index.php/articles/1104365/fita-taekwondo-course-vatican-city

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Jordan’s taekwondo athlete Farah Al Asa’ad has successfully reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro on her fundraising mission for the Taekwondo Humanitarian Foundation (THF).

The THF’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator was part of a group which made it to the summit of Africa’s highest mountain after nearly a week of climbing.

She unveiled the THF flag at the peak which measures in at 5,895 metres.

Kilimanjaro is the highest free-standing mountain in the world with Al Asa’ad’s expedition to Tanzania led by Jordanian mountaineer Mostafa Salameh, a former refugee who became the first Jordanian to scale Mount Everest.

The THF works to teach taekwondo to refugees and displaced people around the world and its flagship academy is at Jordan’s Azraq camp, which is home to Syrians who have fled the conflict in their country.

“I would like to send a message to support the refugees in all refugee camps around the world,” said Al Asa’ad.

“To achieve their dreams and aspirations by practicing sport that develops their bodies, minds, and their self confidence, that teaches them tolerance and sport’s ethics, and enlighten their lives with hope for a better future.”

Sponsorship for the trip was provided by G Global Marketing and Business Management and Tatweeg news, and the ascent received backing from World Taekwondo and its President Chungwon Choue.

It was Choue who first announced the creation of the THF on the International Day of Peace in 2015, during a speech at the United Nations in New York City.

“The mountain that has inspired the African continent on its journey to freedom, today its inspiration extends to reach all the world’s refugees, renewing hope in them and promising them a better tomorrow,” Al Asa’ad added.

“From here I send a message to all the refugees of the world as stated by Ibrahim Nasrallah in his book Souls of Kilimanjaro.

“Every person has a summit that he/she must ascend, otherwise he/she will remain at the bottom, no matter what he/she ascends from the top.”

The THF at Azraq could produce a Tokyo 2020 Olympian this year with Wael Fawaz Al-Farraj, the project’s first black belt, bidding to be part of the Refugee Olympic Team in the Japanese capital.

Paris 2024 is also a target for the athletes training at the facility.

Salameh is one of the few people to have completed the Explorers Grand Slam, meaning he has visited both the North and South Poles and the Seven Summits – the highest mountains on each continent.

Donations for the THF can be made here.

Original Article:

https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1103696/taekwondo-thf-kilimanjaro-summit

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HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — In Zimbabwe, where girls as young as 10 are forced to marry due to poverty or traditional and religious practices, a teenage taekwondo enthusiast is using the sport to give girls in an impoverished community a fighting chance at life.

“Not many people do taekwondo here, so it’s fascinating for the girls, both married and single. I use it to get their attention,” said 17-year old Natsiraishe Maritsa, a martial arts fan since the age of 5 who is now using taekwondo to rally young girls and mothers to join hands and fight child marriage.

Children as young as four and some of Natsiraishe’s former schoolmates who are now married, line up on the tiny, dusty yard outside her parents’ home in the poor Epworth settlement, about 15 kilometers (9 miles) southeast of the capital, Harare.

They enthusiastically follow her instructions to stretch, kick, strike, punch and spar. After class, they talk about the dangers of child marriage. Holding their babies, the recently married girls took the lead.

One after the other, they narrated how their marriages have turned into bondage, including verbal and physical abuse, marital rape, pregnancy-related health complications, and being hungry.

“We are not ready for this thing called marriage. We are just too young for it,” Maritsa told The Associated Press after the session, which she said is “a safe space” for the girls to share ideas.

“The role of teen mothers is usually ignored when people campaign against child marriages. Here, I use their voices, their challenges, to discourage those young girls not yet married to stay off early sexual activity and marriage,” said Maritsa.

Neither boys nor girls may legally marry until the age of 18, according to Zimbabwean law enacted after the Constitutional Court in 2016 struck down earlier legislation that allowed girls to marry at 16.

Nonetheless, the practice remains widespread in the economically struggling southern African nation, where an estimated 30% of girls are married before reaching 18, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. Child marriage is prevalent across Africa, and rising poverty amid the COVID-19 pandemic has increased pressures on families to marry off their young daughters.

For some poor families in Zimbabwe, marrying off a young daughter means one less burden, and the bride price paid by the husband is often “used by families as a means of survival,” according to Girls Not Brides, an organization that campaigns to end child marriages.

Some religious sects encourage girls as young as 10 to marry much older men for “spiritual guidance,” while some families, to avoid “shame,” force girls who engage in pre-marital sex to marry their boyfriends, according to the organization.

Maritsa, through her association called Vulnerable Underaged People’s Auditorium, is hoping to increase the confidence of both the married and single girls through the martial arts lessons and the discussions that follow.

Zimbabwe’s ban on public gatherings imposed as part of strict lockdown measures last week to try to slow an unprecedented surge in new COVID-19 infections have forced Maritsa to suspend the sessions, but she hopes to resume as soon as the lockdown is lifted.

“From being hopeless, the young mothers feel empowered … being able to use their stories to dissuade other girls from falling into the same trap,” said Maritsa, who said she started the project in 2018 after seeing her friends leave school for marriage.

Some, such as her best friend, 21-year-old Pruzmay Mandaza, are now planning on returning to school, although her husband forced her to step down as vice-chair of the association and stopped her from participating in the taekwondo training.

Inside the neatly decorated small house adorned with Maritsa’s medals and pictures, her parents prepare fruit juice and some cookies for the girls — their sacrifice to help their daughter’s efforts.

“I can only take 15 people per session because the only support I get is from my parents,” said Maritsa. “My father is a small-scale farmer, my mother is a full-time housewife but they sacrifice the little they have toward what I want to achieve,” she said. “He is my jogging partner,” she added, referring to her father.

Taekwondo is not very popular in soccer-mad Zimbabwe, but there are pockets of professional and backyard training schools.

Despite her limited resources, Maritsa is committed to her mission.

Early marriages could be increasing as COVID-19 keeps children away from school and deepens poverty, warn women’s groups.

Even some of those attending Maritsa’s home sessions seem to have different priorities.

“We need to know how to keep our husbands happy, that’s what’s important,” Privilege Chimombe, a 17-year-old mother of two who had her first child at 13 and has been abandoned by her husband, said after a recent session.

“These are the perceptions we have to fight,” responded Maritsa. “It’s tough, but it has to be done.”

Original Article:

https://apnews.com/article/zimbabwe-teen-teaches-taekwondo-fde85a3c65703eb09bef1acfbf733e67

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SOUTH KOREA – 2020/05/07 – World Taekwondo (WT), the Taekwondo Humanitarian Foundation (THF) and the Union Internationale Motonautique (UIM) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) today to promote humanitarian, peace and development initiatives in Sport.

Original Article:

WT, THF and UIM sign MoU to promote humanitarian initiatives

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| No one is immune to his unusual charms. In this normally tightly regimented city, Jung even persuaded the prim North Korean announcer, wearing a bright green hanbok dress, to shop a board in two for the crowd watching his demonstration. “Female or male, old people and young, black white, it doesn’t matter – we’re just all wishing for unification,” Jung, 64, of Cedar Rapids, told the audience.
Just as the United States and China drew closer together through “ping pong diplomacy” in the 1970s, Jung and his delegation of martial arts practitioners hope their “tae kwon do diplomacy” can help resolve the Koreas’ equally intransigent stalemate.

| “Ping ping helped the USA and China have a relationship Tae kwon do will do the same to reconcile North and South,” said Jun Lee, 45, another Korean-American tae kwon do grandmaster, who traveled to North Korea from Raleigh, N.C.
Even tae kwon do itself has fallen victim to the hostility between the communist North and capitalist South. Rival factions in the two Koreas pledge allegiance to different sports bodies that disagree about the sport’s origins. But in Pyongyang this month, the talk of the rival sports bodies fell by the wayside as the visitors used their fists and feet to break prejudices and bring people together.

| With cries of “Tongil!” – meaning “unification” – the black belt broke boards at the Demilitarized Zone, tourist sites and for a crowd of some 2,400 during the May 18 celebration at the Taekwondo Palace in Pyongyang.

| The North Korean tae kwon do demonstration team drew hearty laughter and cheers from the initially reserved crowd by performing a series of skits, in which female black belts used acrobatic kicks and punched to repel men acting as attackers. One male athlete performed a leaping kick over a three-person-high human pyramid to spit a board – and still land on his feet. Other broke boards, bricks and tiles with bare hands and feet, sending dust and debris flying to the amazed oohs and aahs of the audience.

| Jung now runs 45 martial arts schools, including Jung’s Tae Kwon Do Academy in Cedar Rapids, and eight fitness centers in the United States, including the New Life Fitness World center in Cedar Rapids.

| Jung was born in 1942 into a farming family in the now-South Korean city of Ulsan. He started learning marital arts because he was bullied at school. Becoming a black belt in just 14 months, his tae kwon do skills helped him stand out during his military service, where a stint on patrol at the DMZ convinced him of the need to work toward Korea’s reunification.

| Jung emigrated to the United States in 1971 and opened his first tae kwon do academy in 1973. He has been a citizen for 30years. Over the years he has trained about 4,300 black belts and publishes a magazine. Tae Kwon Do Times, from Cedar Rapids.

| He has visited North Korea eight times since 1992 as part of his reconciliation efforts.
“I’m not South or North, I’m Korean,” he said.
He said last night of his demonstration that North Koreans “are never smiling. This time they were smiling. They gave us a big hand.”
He’ll leave the politics to others: “Politics is government’s business. I’m just a martial arts person.”

Historic International Taekwondo Federation Demonstration team from North Korea at Kukkiwon, June 28, 2017. The Goodwill Tours spearheaded by Woojin Jung in 2007 & 2011 for Unification and peace in Korea through TaeKwonDo led to the International Taekwondo Federation returning to South Korea for the first time in 45 years on June 23, 2017. These pioneering events hope to lead to many more bridges of peace and collaboration through Martial Arts and Martial Arts people for many generations to come.

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The Brazilian Taekwondo Confederation (CBTKD) has announced the 15 members who will form the organization’s Athletes’ Commission.

Online voting to select the representatives took place with athletes from five different regions elected.

Henrique Precioso, Venilton Teixeira and Gabriel da Silva will represent the north region with lisson Bomfim, Edival Marques and Nivea Barros earning seats for the northeast.

Valeria Rodrigues, Fernando Manresa and Patrik Cardoso have been chosen for the midwest and Lina Bacelar, Guilherme Felix and Milena Titoneli will represent the southeast.

João Miguel Neto, João Victor Diniz and Alessandra Trevisan have been elected for the south region.

There were 20 candidates for the 15 positions and 164 votes were cast in all.

The CBTKD said forming the Commission was “another important step towards the professionalization, transparency and democratization of the management of Brazilian taekwondo”.

“This is an event of great relevance for all Brazilian taekwondo and we are very proud to be able to provide this online voting, transparent, safe and equal,” said CBTKD President Alberto Maciel Junior.

“I am grateful to the Electoral Commission for the commitment and support throughout the process and in particular to our athlete representative, Diogo Silva, who coordinated all the electoral conduct with the CBTKD.

“I congratulate all participants in this process, from candidates to voters.

“To those who won, I appreciate wisdom and responsibility so that they can exercise this new and important role in our sport in the best possible way.”

All of the elected athletes have won four year terms which will begin on January 1.

The Commission will work to ensure the voice of athletes is heard and will be given a vote at CBTKD meetings.

Silva is a member of the Brazilian Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Commission, representing taekwondo.

Original article:

https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1101113/taekwondo-brazil-athletes-commission

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