IS TAE KWON-DO IRELAND’S most successful but least talked-about sport?
Certainly, it has enjoyed considerable success of late in this country.
At the recent International Tae kwon-Do Federation (ITF) World Championships in Benidorm, Spain, the Irish side placed second overall out of 58 countries. After securing 10 Gold, six Silver and 11 Bronze medals, Team Ireland were narrowly beaten into second place by Poland (13 Gold, six Silver and eight Bronze).
Six individual world titles were won over the course of the competition, with Ellen Ince (sparring and 1st Dan Patterns), Louise McCagh, Dylan Fitzgibbon, Dylan Murphy and Denise O’Brien all triumphing.
While the 48 Irish athletes deserve enormous credit for their phenomenal achievements, the role of the seven coaches who travelled must not be overlooked either.
It was a fitting reward too for Stephen Ryan, Secretary General of the Irish Taekwon-Do Association. Ryan has an obvious passion for the sport when he discusses it, and he’s been competing himself for over 20 years, having originally become interested from “watching movies on the TV with people like Bruce Lee”.
Ryan was on the team that won two golds back at the World Championships in Poland in 2003 — a time when the sport was not at such an advanced level as it is now in Ireland, while he also won a 2011 individual silver at the same competition.
However, he readily admits that the new generation of athletes are on their way towards surpassing anything their predecessors ever achieved.“It’s the biggest medal haul we’ve ever had at the World Championships and the biggest individual haul we’ve had at a Championships as well,” Ryan tells TheScore.ie. “It’s a massive thing for us but it’s a pity that people in the general community and across the country don’t know about it. The amount of training these athletes are putting in, two or three sessions a day and six or seven days a week.
“They are training at the top level — the same as everyone would in every other international sport — so for us, it’s an amazing achievement and the reaction within the Taekwon-Do community has been superb. The younger kids coming through can see what’s possible and there are so many world champions going back into the Taekwon-Do clubs around the country and the kids are looking at the medals around their neck and it’s something to aspire towards.
“It surpassed our expectations, but since the current crop of coaches took over in 2009, we have been coming back with more and more medals from each championship. If you can compare it to the last World Championships in New Zealand, we’ve got so many more medals. We are dealing with a bigger squad. We don’t receive funding from the sports council even though we’re recognised by them. So we couldn’t afford to send that many athletes to New Zealand. The World Championships before that were Argentina and we did really well — there was plenty of medals won.
“With the amount of training they’ve been putting in and the amount of medals they’ve been winning, especially at junior level, we’ve had fantastic success. What’s happening now is that a good crop of juniors are turning senior. Not that the people before weren’t any good, but the talent is getting better all the time.”