Adam Zięba takes double crown

Adam Zięba won two gold medals at the ITF Moravia Open taekwon-do tournament held on 24 and 25 September in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Nearly 300 competitors from the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, England and Poland took part in the entire competition. Our club was represented by 6 competitors.

The competition was organised in the ITF-NK form of taekwon-do. It differed significantly from the generally applicable sparring rules. A difficulty for the competitors from Kraków was the limitation of hand techniques to two strikes in a combination, as well as the different, lower scoring for foot techniques performed without jumping. A complete misunderstanding, on the other hand, was the rule stating that striking techniques to an opponent’s guard were scored as long as the guard was touching the body.

A positive curiosity was that the light-contact bouts were held with repechage. Thus, every competitor had at least two bouts. Losing the first bout still provided a chance to win bronze.

The tournament results seemed rather strange to us. It happened that gold medals were won by competitors who never engaged in a bout; they kicked at the guard and fell over in order to prevent their opponent from scoring. Nevertheless, there were also very positive surprises. Nearly all the competitors from Slovenia belonged to this group—they were very combative and technically excellent.

In these circumstances, our competitors performed very well, despite this being their first event after the summer break. The greatest success was achieved by Adam Zięba, who won both sparring events, semi- and light-contact. A pleasant surprise was also the silver medal won by the senior team, composed mainly of competitors from our club.

Here are the detailed results of our competitors:

Adam Zięba (senior) – 1st place, light-contact; 1st place, pointfightng -64 kg

Jakub Włodarz (senior) – 1st place, pointfighting -78 kg

Mateusz Kopciński (senior) – 2nd place, light-contact -85 kg

Dobrochna Dolicka (senior woman) – 2nd place, light-contact; 2nd place, pointfighting -57 kg

Karolina Nowak (junior woman) – 2nd place, light-contact; 3rd place, pointfighting -58 kg

Mikołaj Chrząszcz (cadet) – no medal.

 

 

Senior team consisting of: Michał Gąsiorczyk (IRS Kraków), Michał Krupa, Adam Zieba, Jakub Włodarz, Mateusz Kopciński (all KCT Kraków) – 2nd place, light-contact.