London Latest - 2012 Test Events in Goalball, Judo, Taekwondo

(ATR) London 2012 tells Around the Rings that spectators will appreciate the "very high standard" of goalball during next year’s Paralympics.

LOCOG sport group manager Pete Ambrose was speaking to ATR on the sidelines of the London International Goalball tournament hosted over the weekend at the Handball Arena in London’s Olympic Park.

The event is the first in LOCOG’s Paralympic test program that will examine the field of play, results, scoring and timing systems as well as key operational procedures throughout the lead-up to the Games.

"Some key elements that we wanted to test from this event were we particularly wanted to look at how the venue worked for people with a visual impairment," Ambrose said of the goalball competition.

"As you can see we have some tactile signage around the venue and we’ve had very positive feedback on that."

LOCOG was also keen to do a "robust test of the acoustics within the venue because it’s a sport where the crowd need to remain silent," according to Ambrose.

"It’s enabled us to see what we need to work on for next year when it comes to making sure the conditions are perfect for the athletes."

Though the crowd was under half of the capacity expected for next year, there was tremendous respect for the passage of play in a sport of which many people were not fully aware.

Team GB’s Jessica Luke told ATR that it felt "amazing" to play in such an impressive venue and one in which the young team enjoyed such tremendous home support.

The cheering was something she and her teammates could "definitely get used to," Luke added.

She also responded to comments made last week by British disability charity Scope, which proposed combining the Olympics and Paralympics into a single competition.

Whilst she admitted a merger of the two would be "incredible," Luke added: "I don’t think it would feasibly be possible with the logistics of it all. I’m happy for the Paralympics to be a single event or merged so long as people are prepared to recognize it as the high level sporting competition that it is."

Ambrose also offered LOCOG’s opinion on the matter, which is essentially that the two events were already seen as joint.

"From a LOCOG perspective we treat the Olympics and the Paralympics exactly the same," he told ATR.

"It’s a fully integrated approach that we have, and that’s the approach that we’ll continue to take for the nextfew months.

"So from our perspective we don’t see as two separate events, we see them as one event."

Taekwondo, Judo Test Events

More test event action unfolded over the weekend just across from Olympic Park at ExCeL, which already played host to boxing, table tennis and fencing last weekend.

This time around, taekwondo and judo took over the east London exhibition center, where the president of the World Taekwondo Federation spoke to ATR about his sport being completely "transparent" for the first time at the London Olympics.

Speaking about the changes made to taekwondo for 2012, Choue Chung-won said: "We’ve shrunk the competition area from Beijing from 10 x 10 to 8 x 8 to create a more dynamic competition.Also we changed the points system – for example, we have four points nowfor a technical head kick. So the variation of the points system makes the game even more dynamic.

"We’re also using a video replay system which makes decisions transparent. Right now we use three cameras, but at London we will have five cameras – four in each corner and one from above. This also makes it good for broadcasting."

Choue also spoke about the Protection Scoring System, which allows points to be scored electronically from a body kit on the athlete. The device is wireless, a martial arts first, but it’s one aspect of the test event that will need to be worked on after failing to function properly on this occasion.

The judo test event literally a corridor away from taekwondo also has some areas to improve upon, according to the president of the International Judo Federation.

"In London, a major effort still needs to be done to improve the broadcast standard for television, as well as the quality of the scoreboards, knowing that the system that will be used here is not the one we are used to monitor at our own events," Marius Vizer told ATR.

He also added his concern about the spectator’s experience of his sport.

"It is important to have large display screens in the venue that will help the entire technical staff (LOCOG + IJF) to be more efficient and that will give to our viewers the opportunity to follow action from different angles while benefiting from the slow-motion pictures," Vizer said.

Written and reported in London byChristian Radnedge.

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