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The North Korean taekwon-do team dominated the competition at the 10th Asian ITF Taekwon-do Championships in Bengaluru, India, last month, coming away with 80 gold medals, 24 silver, and 9 bronze.
That easily surpassed host nation India, with 52 golds, and third-place Kazakhstan with 32 golds.
A total of 19 countries were represented over the seven-day event, but South Korea, which has run circles around the world in taekwondo in the Olympics, was notably absent.
North Korea, meanwhile, despite its obvious dominance in the sport, has never sent a fighter to the Olympics.
The reason is because the International Olympic Committee does not recognize the International Taekwon-do Federation’s, or ITF’s, version of the martial art, which is favored in the North.
Instead, it recognizes the version governed by World Taekwondo, or WT, favored in the South.
The difference between the two is more than just some slight variations in the rules. Olympic basketball and ice hockey use different rules than the NBA and NHL, yet pros from both leagues play in the Olympics. It would be fairly easy for an ITF practitioner to make adjustments to compete under WT rules.
(Also, the ITF spells the sport in English with a hyphen and the WT does not.)
As is often the case in the Korean Peninsula, politics contributed to the split, but both organizations were founded in Seoul.
Schism
The ITF is the older organization, established in 1966 by Choi Hong Hi, a former South Korean army general who according to the New York Times, is widely acknowledged as the founder of the sport, combining self-defense techniques found in Japanese karate and several Korean martial arts.
Choi coined the name taekwon-do, meaning “the way of the foot and the fist” about a decade earlier in 1955, and he was intent on spreading his new fighting style to the rest of the world.
However, he ran afoul of the South Korean government when the ITF wanted to include North Korea in its international outreach.
Choi, who had been born in what is now North Korea, was displeased that the South would allow politics to get in the way of growing the sport, so he went into voluntary exile in Canada in 1972.
The South Korean government then established the World Taekwondo Federation, or WTF, the following year.
Choi traveled to North Korea in 1979 and ended up staying for good. The North Korean government embraced his version of taekwon-do and offered its support in spreading the sport worldwide.
Global popularity
The two rival federations made global inroads, teaching the sport to the rest of the world, often operating in the same countries. By the mid-1980s, taekwondo had become the most-studied martial art in the United States and had significant popularity in other countries with diasporic Korean populations.
Taekwondo made its Olympic debut as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, but it was the South Korean-supported WTF version. It was a demonstration sport again in 1992 and became a full medal sport from 2000 on.
WTF remained the governing body recognized by the IOC. In 2017, it dropped “Federation” from its name, becoming World Taekwondo, or WT, to avoid links to the expletive “WTF.”
Because of the schism, North Korea never sends athletes to the Olympics to compete in taekwondo, and it also does not participate in the Asian or World Taekwondo Championships held alternatively each year, as they are WT events.
The ITF championship in India was not only significant for North Korea because of the medal count, it is one of the first international sporting competitions to feature North Korean athletes since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
North Korea sent a small delegation of 16 athletes to the 2024 Paris Olympics, winning silver medals in table tennis and diving, and four bronze medals in boxing, diving and wrestling.
It has also sent its U-20 women’s soccer team to the U-20 world cup in Colombia, which defeated Argentina 6-2 on Monday and will face Costa Rica on Thursday and the Netherlands on Sunday.
Translated by Claire S. Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.