IOC confirms Taekwondo to be one of nine sports that will be played at Olympic Esports Series 2023

연합뉴스 / 2023-03-02 09:50:28

▲ This photo, provided by the WT, shows the virtual Taekwondo competition. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)

SEOUL, Mar. 2 (Yonhap) -- Taekwondo, a Korean form of martial arts involving punching and kicking techniques, has expanded to the esports stage.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed the nine sports that will be played at the upcoming Olympic Esports Series 2023, which will be hosted by Singapore over four days. The initially confirmed featured games across nine sports are Archery, baseball, chess, cycling, dance, motorsport, sailing, tennis, and Taekwondo.

Taekwondo is the only form of martial arts announced to be featured in the upcoming global competition.

The Olympic Esports Series, created by the ICOC in partnership with the International Federation of Sports (IFs), gaming and esports communities, will serve as a venue where both professional and amateur players from all across the globe will be invited to take part in qualification rounds across a host of the featured games.

Virtual sports competition has been one of the essential projects that the IOC has been supporting as the future of sports competition, which has also been laid out in the Olympic Agenda 2020+5.

Ahead of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, the IOC hosted the 2021 series, which attracted over 250,000 participants from across 100 countries to take part in featured games across five sports, including sailing, cycling, rowing, motorsports, and baseball.

This year’s series will begin on Thursday and will culminate in live, in-person finals for the first time in Singapore from 22 to 25 June. The gripping finals action will be a highlight of the recently announced Olympic Esports Week 2023 and will be streamed globally across Olympics.com and Olympic social channels.

The World Taekwondo (WT) has been developing a virtual Taekwondo competition system in partnership with Singapore-based game and IT company Refract for years, expecting the age of virtual sports to come.

Unlike a PC game played only with hands, the virtual games will be played in an even similar manner to the actual game by using motion tracking technology that would track the player’s full-body movement and compete against the virtual opponent. In a nutshell, the player’s body will serve as the game controller.

The evolved format of the IOC’s virtual competition has, therefore, opened up a new venue for an online Taekwondo competition to be held without any restrictions on gender, age, physical disabilities, or region.

In the upcoming Taekwondo matches, four male and female players and four junior male and female players will compete against each other in the finals without going through the preliminaries. There will be three rounds of a two-minute match, and it will be two wins out of three games, just like the rules of the in-person competitions.

Cho Jung-won, chairman of WT, said, “I am glad that Taekwondo has been named one of the Olympic Esports Series, which we say would be an accomplishment of our endless efforts to introduce and develop the latest technology by constantly going after brand-new areas,” adding, “We will make sure that there will be more opportunities for Taekwondo to reach out to the younger and new fans in the future.”

(This article is translated from Korean to English by Ha eun Lee)

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