Message to World Taekwondo
Dear World Taekwondo Federation,
Our vision is to make taekwondo inclusive to as many people world wide and be as fun to play and watch as video games. We want to grow the number of practitioners from 80 million to over 160 million and have taekwondo be shown as a major sporting event like boxing, MMA, basketball or soccer.
The sport of Olympic taekwondo has been making progress by removing human error and bias with the introduction of electronic scoring in 2009, but the sport has also digressed in its global appeal to both athletes and participants which goes directly against the the primary goal of the WTF which is “promote, expand, and improve worldwide the practice of taekwondo”.
As practitioners of taekwondo for many years, you will recall the days between 1980 and mid 1990s when sparring drew a lot of power from our athletes. Kicks needed to be strong to register a point as you recall the fights in the 1988 Olympics. In the mid 1990s with the introduction of trigger scoring by judges – points were being shown in real time on the scoreboard and athletes were rewarded for both power techniques and combinations since judges were held accountable to the audience to register points as they happened in real time. This accountability made the sport more dynamic for both athletes and spectators to watch, and is what shepherded the sport into the Olympics officially. The sport was truly progressing forward at this point.
With the introduction of electronic chest protectors in 2009, we did remove the chance of human error and bias, but we did this at a great cost. The sport has been reduced to favor one body type (tall and lean) and one technique (the cut kick). This has made the sport less interesting across the board for athletes, coaches and spectators.
We created a company called 2020 Armor to solve this challenge to drive athletes to perform in a way that keeps the audience engaged. We have a patented set of electronic chest protectors and new scoring system that has gained a lot of support from athletes, coaches and fans. You can read all about the new system on our website https://store.2020armor.com/.
This new set of equipment and rules is not only great for olympic taekwondo athletes, but also the 79 million recreational taekwondo practitioners. A secondary version will be developed for the training benefit of the next generation athlete as well. This recreational model will be more affordable than the competition model yet will have the same scoring system. In addition, the recreational model will feature programming capabilities that enable club owners to set and create games that engage their students and motivate them to utilize the equipment to the next level of their training.
The team at 2020 armor is very experienced. We have a combined experience in the sport of Olympic Taekwondo (100+ years), business (60+ years), fundraising (30+ years), hardware (30+ years) and software (30+ years).
We hope to have your support in rolling this new system out in the 2020 Olympics in Japan. We can be reached at contact@2020armor.com.
