BY AI YOSHIDA
The year 2000 is about to witness the Summer Olympic Games to be held in Sydney, Australia, with two newly-added events; Taekwon-do and the Triathlon.
Taekwon-do was originally a fighting technique for self-defence that Koreans developed from generation to generation over two thousand years. It has grown to be a world-wide sport which Korea is now proud of. Taekwon-do has become popular all over the world as a sport since the armistice of WWII. The Korea Taekwon-do Association estimates at the membership present to be more than 4 million people from 125 countries (http://www.taekwon-do.co.jp).
The man who has established Taekwon-do as a world sport is Choi Hong Hi, who practiced Karate in Japan to strengthen himself for fighting. When he became Major General of Korea, he began to teach the martial arts to the Army. This experience led him to study martial arts in earnest, and he tried to form a particular martial arts for Korea which is based on various martial arts such as Karate. As a result, it took him about eight years to complete the basics of the techniques. April11th, 1955 saw a refined Taekwon-do, which established an amalgamation of skills with spirit. "Tae" of taekwon-do stands for foot-techniques, such as step, jump and kick. "Kwon" stands for fist, and "Do" signifies the spirit of sportsmanship. Matches comprise of three rounds, each of which is three minutes, and the 1st person to win two rounds is the winner. Victory or defeat is decide by scoring against the opponent and by losing points by fouling or warnings. Kiyoteru Higuchi and Yoriko Okamoto will represent Japan in taekwon-do.
The Triathlon, which is the other new event, is a compound word of "Tri" and "Athlon." The former stands for three in Latin and the latter for an athletic. It is comprised of the three events of swimming, cycling, and a long-distance race.
The Triathlon seems to be beyond human power. The Triathlon originated in Hawaii; " Waikiki Rough Water Swim," " Around Oahu Bicycle Race," and " Honolulu Marathon Race." One night in October, 1977, when same Marine Corps were drinking, they had an argument about which is the toughest athlete of the three. This is the origin of the Triathlon in February, 1978, the first triathlon race was held in Oahu.
The triathlon is, therefore, a three-fold event in which participants compete for the total time of respective subevents: swimming, cycling and a long-distance race. In the Olympic games, the official Olympic distance is 51.5 km divided as 1.5 km for swimming, 40 km for the cycling race, and 10 km for the long distance race. The five Japanese entries for this event are Takumi Obara, Hiroyuki Nishiuchi, Haruna Hosoya, Akiko Hirao, and Kiyomi Niwaya. The results of the national ranking of Japanese teams as of March has the women' s team occupying fifth place, and the men's in eighth place.
A lot of games of both events are being played in Japan, which are absolutely fascinating to the Japanese. The matches of Taekwon-do are played all year around without reference to the seasons, while those of the Triathlon are played almost every week during summer. Taekwon-do has become familiar to the Japanese because of the similarity in spirit between Taekwon-do and Japan's martial arts such as Karate. Concerning the Triathlon, as is the tradition, there will be a meet for the elementary school children. By adding the new events the enjoyment of watching the Olympics will increase.