First Korean athlete to compete in the Olympic men’s 80kg class.
Seo Geon-woo (20, Korea National Sport University) continues the ‘golden kick’ momentum of Korean taekwondo by advancing to the semifinals of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Seo Geon-woo defeated Henrique Marques Rodriguez Fernandez (Brazil) with a round score of 2-0 (4-4 2-2) in the quarterfinals of the men’s 80kg class taekwondo competition held at the Grand Palais in Paris, France on the 9th (Korean time).
Seo Geon-woo is ranked 4th in the Olympic sparring world rankings compiled by the World Taekwondo Federation (WT) up until June, just before the competition. Fernandez is ranked 23rd.
The ranking gap was quite large, but the match was tight.
After about a minute of the first round, Seo Gun-woo and Rodriguez Fernandez tied the score at 2-2 with body kicks, but Seo Gun-woo immediately struck the body again to take the lead at 4-2. He then allowed two deductions to finish the round at 4-4. According to the rule that
if a round ends with a tie, the winner is determined by the player with more points from spinning kicks, the player with more points from head-body-fist-deductions in that order, and the player with more effective electronic protector strikes, Seo Gun-woo won the first round by scoring more points with strikes.
In the second round, Seo Gun-woo attacked the body with a kick to take a 2-0 lead. Seo Gun-woo, who had the upper hand, received a deduction with 48 seconds left, and another deduction was added right before the second round. Seo Gun-woo won the second round by scoring points with strikes again. From the 2000 Sydney Games, when Taekwondo became an official Olympic sport, to the previous competition, the 2020 Tokyo Games, no athlete had competed in the men’s 80 kg class. Seo Geon-woo, the first Korean athlete to compete in this sport, is looking up at the podium. In Taekwondo, Park Tae-jun (Kyunghee University) in the men’s 58 kg class and Kim Yu-jin (Ulsan Metropolitan City Sports Council) in the women’s 57 kg class won gold for two consecutive days. Seo Geon-woo is only two wins away from winning the gold medal. 토토사이트