Taekwondo No. 2 Looks Ahead to London 2012, Future Olympics

(ATR) The secretary general of the World Taekwondo Federation tells Around the Rings that London 2012 will be the "best ever" Olympics for his sport.

"I think the London Olympics is the high point of the achievements we’ve made in the sport," says Jean-Marie Ayer.

"The major challenges is that you can not always have everything under control and we might have things happening that we wouldn’t like to see but so far we don’t expect any developments on our side at the Olympics – we think the Games will be the best ever for us."

Ayer was speaking to ATR at last week’s 9th World Junior Taekwondo Championships in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh, where recent changes to the sport such as video replay as well as the Protector and Scoring System (PSS) were on full display.

PSS was also tested at December’s test event for the 2012 Olympics, but there were some problems with points registering, a situation Ayer said should not resurface this summer.

"One major issue we had at the test event was the transmission from the field of play to the scoring system, where we saw that depending on the situation we could have interference with other devices in theroom," he explained.

"Now the provider of the body protector has been implementing a number of controls so that we have a good understanding of interferences in the venue so we can understand what’s going on and intervene when necessary.

"We believe we will have that under control. It will be easier to do that at the Olympics because we will have more control thanwe have here."

According to Ayer, these changes and more were introduced after Beijing 2008 both to stage a fairer and more dynamic competition than at previous Games as well as to try and secure taekwondo as an Olympic sport for the future. The IOC will decide next year whether any sports will be cut from the Olympic program for 2020.

"We’re now taking improvements to the sport on basically a four-year Olympic cycle," he said.

"For the future, what we need to focus on – we have to review the competition formula so we actually have to now become bigger for the media."

Ayer added that he wants to make taekwondo competitions more "attractive for the media and more attractive for the public" so that the sport can achieve better TV coverage as well as better overall media coverage of actions taken by the WTF.

"There’s huge potential to move this sport forward and achieve a very high level," he told ATR.

"We are a universal sport. We are in many countries."

With reporting in Sharm El Sheikh by Christian Radnedge.

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