World Taekwondo Championships 2019
I hope everyone is ready for another martial arts post. I really enjoy writing them but have trouble finding the inspiration for them. The first three were all inspired by the fight between Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong and his tai chi counterpart Wei Lei. Similarly this one was inspired when I read something, this time about the controversial loss that Zheng Shuyin, from China, suffered at the hands (feet?) of Bianca Walkden of Great Britain at the 2019 World Taekwondo Championships in Manchester on May 17, 2019.
According to the articles about the fight, Zheng Shuyin fell behind early, but build a solid 20-10 lead towards the end of the fight. Bianca Walkden, although behind on points, continued to force Zheng Shuyin to leave the fighting area, causing Zheng to get a penalty. After 10 penalties Zheng was disqualified and Walkden was declared the winner of the women’s 73 kg division.
Having read the headlines I was interested in what was so controversial about the loss. I could understand it wasn’t what the fans wanted to see and was probably a let down, but to call it controversial seemed a little over the top. I decided to read a little more about what happened.
The BBC mentions that Walkden was booed repeatedly after the fight, presumably by fans upset with the manner in which she won1. According to Asia Times the Chinese head coach called the British tactics “dirty” and the British coach retorted that the Chinese were being disrespectful2. Sixth Tone, a website that reports on topics of interest in China, looks at the response from Chinese netizens to the results of the fight. While noting that some comments on a video of the fight did commend Walkden for finding a way to win, it seems to suggest that most of the comments are negative in connotation, criticizing Walkden for stealing a gold medal from Zheng. It also talks about the responses from Zheng, who was surprised someone could win that way and seemed to think it was unfair, and her coach/head of the Chinese Taekwondo Federation Guan Jianmin, who appealed to overturn the decision and ban the referee for life. One person commented “This is the darkest day in the Taekwondo world” under the video3. China Daily also wrote about Guan calling the loss a “scandal” and mentioned all the booing Walkden received after the fight4.
After reading these articles I decided to write about how I thought it was pretty ridiculous to criticize Walkden for winning in such a way and set out to write a post defending Walkden and criticizing the people who were upset with Walkden for winning the way she did. I felt that if the sport gave penalties for going out of bounds and you could win on penalties then forcing your opponent out of bounds enough times was a valid strategy. I thought that criticizing her instead of being upset with the sport for having rules that allowed something like that was a little backwards. I wrote at least half of the post while sitting in Starbucks during my lunch break one day. It was at this point I decided to check out the video from the Sixth Tone article which was on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) just to be safe5. I couldn’t understand it because it was in Chinese. So off I went to find an English video about the fight on Youtube and sure enough right at the top was a video examining the penalties that Zheng accrued during the fight6. After watching the video I scrapped that first article and went to read a little about the official rules of Taekwondo.
What the articles I read failed to mention was the nature of all the penalties. The way I read the articles was that Zheng was forced out of bounds ten times and lost because of it. But she wasn’t just given penalties for going out of bounds. She also got penalties at least for illegal blocking and delay of match. Watching the bits of match that the video showed explaining the penalties another thing became clear; Walkden didn’t get any penalties. She was probably just as guilty of delaying as Zheng (although neither seemed to reach the amount of time necessary to cause a penalty) and on multiple occasions she seemed to grab onto Zheng. At least once it even looked like she grabbed Zheng and just pushed her out of bounds. Despite all this she didn’t get a single penalty. Suddenly the Chinese coach’s anger and appeals don’t seem so strange.
While bad calls certainly aren’t unheard of (the 2019 NFC championship game between the Rams and Saints comes to mind), and human error is an unavoidable part of sports, the volume of bad calls in this match seems a little suspect. The way I see it there are two possibilities. The first is that the judge was somehow biased either against Zheng or favorably for Walkden. The second is that Walkden skillfully (if such a word should be used here) positioned herself in such a way as to obstruct the referee’s vision so that the referee was unable to see what she was doing, causing him to give penalties to Zheng that she didn’t commit and miss ones Walkden should have gotten. If that’s the case then she may have cheated (my knowledge of the rules is still shaky) or she may have just unfairly exploited the fact there’s only one referee. I also suppose the video I watched could have cherry picked pieces of the fight to show in the same way that a part of a speech can be taken out of context. That seems unlikely though. Either of these could be a problem for the sport since one undermines people’s faith in the organization while the second could encourage similar action by other people in the future.
I’m not sure what will happen. World Taekwondo should review the fight to see if Walkden was actually committing numerous penalties that went uncalled while Zheng was called for penalties she didn’t commit. If it turns out there’s just one or two bad calls then that can probably be attributed to human error but if it turns out there were many then World Taekwondo probably needs to address what happened and find a way to keep it from happening going forward. Even if the results can’t be overturned like the Chinese coach wants they need to find some way to improve the sport to prevent the same or similar scenarios in the future. For example they could consider adding another couple of referees to make it harder to hide in blind spots. Sort of like how base umpires in baseball make calls farther from the home plate umpire.
I really hope I’m not overlooking anything or misunderstanding what happened. If I’m not then it’s extremely unfortunate what happened to Zheng Shuyin at the World Taekwondo Championships. The fans were right to be upset with the result and World Taekwondo needs to act to prevent “the darkest day in the Taekwondo world” from repeating itself.
Sources
Give the penalty video a watch here and please tell me if there was something I missed or if I’m way off base on this somehow.
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