Disclaimer
This is a family blog about one child’s first competitive Taekwon-Do adventure, written by a father whose martial-arts expertise largely consists of making coffee, driving long distances and standing outside a competition ring looking concerned. Any technical descriptions are deliberately simplified. No tactical advice should be inferred, particularly from our proven strategy of grading up immediately before entering a national championship. Names and events are included in the spirit of celebrating a thoroughly enjoyable sporting weekend.
Apart from tennis, cricket, swimming, piano, junior parkrun and whatever other activity has somehow found its way into our family calendar, it is reasonably well documented that Eddie also does martial arts.
Because apparently having an eight-year-old with free time is something we are fundamentally opposed to.
More specifically, he does Taekwon-Do and has trained with Evolution Martial Arts for the last four years.
Following his most recent grading, he moved from green belt with white stripe to a full green belt.
Naturally, this seemed the perfect moment to enter a national competition.
Strategically, perhaps not.
I later heard that some competitors had apparently taken the slightly more sophisticated approach of not completing their next grading before the championships, allowing them to remain in the lower belt category.
Now that is tournament planning.
That level of organisation would rarely enter the Richardt household. We tend to grade first, enter tournament second and investigate the consequences somewhere around the A303.
“Do You Think He’s Ready?”
When the club message came through advertising the UK Taekwon-Do Championships in Guildford, I asked Katie — Eddie’s instructor for the last four years — whether she thought entering would actually be sensible.
She thought he was ready.
That was really all Eddie needed to hear.
“Do you want to do it?”
“Yes.”
No committee meeting.
No strategic review.
No risk assessment.
Just yes.
So, around two weeks before the championships, we completed what was actually quite an extensive entry form.
Height.
Weight.
Belt grade.
Competition categories.
Various other details presumably designed to prevent a 130 cm eight-year-old green belt accidentally finding himself fighting a six-foot black belt from Belgium.
Then came the payment.
£40 lighter, Eddie was officially entered.
The competition ran across the whole weekend, with the higher grades — black, red and blue belts — competing on Saturday, followed by yellow and green belts on Sunday.
Olga briefly investigated whether staying somewhere near Guildford might be sensible.
Then she investigated the hotel prices.
We decided Taunton was suddenly remarkably close to Guildford.
5am: Because Apparently This Is Our Hobby Now
Saturday evening therefore involved going to bed somewhere between 8pm and 9pm because the alarm was set for the sort of time normally reserved for airport departures, farmers and people making questionable life decisions.
Around 5–5.30am, we surfaced.
Eddie’s bag was already packed.
Sandwiches and assorted snacks were scrambled together.
More importantly, enough coffee was produced to keep several adults clinically functional until Hampshire.
We left at around 6am and headed east.
At that time on a Sunday morning the A303 is actually rather pleasant, although much of the early journey disappeared into fog.
Once we climbed towards Salisbury Plain, however, the sun started coming up.
It was one of those surprisingly idyllic drives: mist sitting in the fields, sunrise appearing over the countryside and barely any traffic.
Which almost made you forget that you had voluntarily got up at 5am to watch children kick each other.
Almost.
We arrived at Guildford Spectrum at around 8.30am, comfortably ahead of the doors opening at 8.45.
Standing in the queue, we immediately spotted people from Taunton.
Of course we did.
You can drive roughly 120 miles east, arrive at a national martial-arts competition and somehow still bump into NHS staff from your own hospital who recognise you.
There really is no escape.
Wait… These Are Actually the UK Championships
Eddie had entered two disciplines:
Patterns and sparring.
Evolution Martial Arts had finished Saturday leading the overall club standings and, as it turned out, that was a position they were not planning to surrender.
Eddie’s first event was:
Patterns – 0–9 years, 6–5 gup.
For anyone unfamiliar with Taekwon-Do grading, coloured belts progress through gup grades, counting down towards black belt. So rather confusingly, the lower the gup number becomes, the more advanced the student is.
Perfectly straightforward.
Once somebody has explained it.
There were 18 children in Eddie’s category.
Eighteen.
From clubs across the country.
And it was around this point that something finally registered in my brain.
These are the UK Championships.
Not the friendly internal club competition.
Not half a dozen Somerset children who have already seen each other repeatedly at training.
The UK Championships.
Oh.
Bronze Number One
Eddie started working his way through the draw.
Round after round, he progressed.
And then suddenly he was in the semi-final.
His opponent was from Belgium.
Yes.
Belgium.
Because apparently the UK Championships containing competitors from all over the UK was not international enough, so Belgium and Spain had also sent teams.
Eddie performed his pattern but was beaten.
His opponent subsequently went on to win the entire category, which at least provides the comforting knowledge that if you are going to lose, losing to the eventual champion is quite an efficient way of doing it.
There was no separate third-place contest, meaning both losing semi-finalists received bronze.
And suddenly, in Eddie’s first competitive Taekwon-Do tournament, he had reached a UK Championship semi-final and won a bronze medal.
Not bad.
Eddie, naturally, initially concentrated on the fact that he had lost.
Because he is Eddie.
Katie and Francis quickly reminded him that reaching a national semi-final at his first competition was perhaps worthy of slightly more celebration than his facial expression suggested.
And there was even more for Evolution Martial Arts to celebrate.
Four of their boys had entered that particular category and three finished in the medal places.
That is an excellent return.
We could probably have stopped there.
One bronze medal.
Successful first tournament.
Excellent experience.
Drive home.
Unfortunately, there remained the small matter of…
Sparring
I will admit this was the discipline I had been looking forward to rather less.
Patterns involve technique, precision and control.
Sparring involves another child attempting to kick your child.
I appreciate this is an unnecessarily simplistic interpretation of an established martial art, but from the perspective of a parent standing outside the ring it is remarkably accurate.
Eddie competed in:
Sparring 0–13 years Male, 6–5 gup, 125.0–134.9 cm.
There were 11 competitors in his height category.
This was why the original entry form had been so interested in his height.
Sparring was divided further by size rather than simply putting everybody of the same belt grade together.
Which seems sensible.
Particularly when your child is eight.
Eddie received what effectively amounted to a bye into the quarter-final and then stepped into the ring for his first competitive sparring bout.
Ninety seconds.
Katie and Francis Miller were in his corner.
Four umpires sat around the ring.
And away they went.
4-0
Eddie won.
4–0.
The four corner umpires independently assessed the bout, meaning all four had Eddie as the winner.
Unanimous.
Which resulted in another slightly surreal moment.
He had now reached another UK Championship semi-final.
Two events.
Two semi-finals.
Perhaps getting up at 5am had not been completely ridiculous after all.
Then came the semi-final.
Welcome to Competitive Sparring
His opponent was a boy from Kilburn.
And he was… enthusiastic.
Very enthusiastic.
Let us describe his style as aggressively committed to forward movement.
Eddie suddenly discovered the difference between sparring during weekly training and facing somebody at a national championship whose apparent tactical plan was:
Forward. Quickly. Repeatedly.
He got rather pummelled.
The result was 0–4.
A deserved defeat and, I suspect, a very useful lesson in what competitive sparring can look like.
Interestingly, the same competitor had entered the patterns competition earlier and had not made it beyond the first round.
Which demonstrated rather nicely that patterns and sparring, although belonging to the same martial art, reward rather different attributes.
Technical precision in one.
A considerably greater appetite for controlled combat in the other.
The defeat meant Eddie had again reached the semi-finals.
And therefore:another bronze medal.
Apparently There Is Such a Thing as Too Aggressive
We then watched the final.
Both finalists were extremely aggressive in their style and both received yellow cards during the contest.
In very simplified parental terms, the message from the officials appeared to be:
Could everybody please remember the word “controlled”?
Taekwon-Do sparring is not simply an invitation to hit somebody as hard as physically possible.
Technique, control and discipline matter, and competitors can be warned or penalised for behaviour or contact considered excessive or outside the competition rules.
So even though two people are actively trying to score points by punching and kicking each other, there remains a point at which the referee essentially says:
Right. That is quite enough punching and kicking.
Martial arts are nuanced.
Two Events. Two Semi-Finals. Two Bronzes.
And that was that.
Eddie’s first proper Taekwon-Do competition was finished.
His first UK Championships.
Patterns: Bronze.
Sparring: Bronze.
For a boy who currently manages roughly one hour of Taekwon-Do training each week, that is a genuinely excellent achievement.
Some of the children competing at this level clearly devote considerably more training time to martial arts.
For Eddie, Taekwon-Do has to fight for diary space with tennis, cricket, swimming, piano, parkrun and probably several things I have temporarily forgotten.
Yet he walked into his first national competition as a newly promoted green belt and reached the semi-finals in both of his events.
Katie and Francis were there in his corner throughout, encouraging him, calming him down and reminding him that losing a semi-final does not somehow constitute failure.
Particularly when the person who beats you in patterns then goes on to win the championship.
There are worse introductions to competitive sport.
Worth the Fuel
Eventually, we packed everything up and started the journey back towards Somerset.
We had lost most of Sunday.
We had consumed industrial quantities of coffee.
We had driven around 240 miles.
The fuel gauge had developed considerably less enthusiasm for the weekend than it possessed when we left Taunton.
But in the back of the car sat one very tired eight-year-old.
And in his bag were two UK Championship bronze medals.
Not bad for his first attempt.
Not bad for someone who had only just moved up to green belt.
And perhaps there is a lesson here about our complete lack of strategic planning.
Other people apparently delay gradings so they can compete in lower belt categories.
We promoted Eddie and then entered him into the UK Championships approximately five minutes later.
He came home with two bronzes anyway.
Which is probably the most Richardt way this could possibly have ended.
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