One by one the North Koreans approached the board, yelled for inspiration and struck out, trying to split the interlocking plates with fist, hand or foot — then reeled away in pain.
“Taekwondo is the spirit of our nation,” said Rim Wi-sok, 26, who won the 71kg fighting category at the Mangyongdae Prize martial arts competition.
The event, held as part of the celebrations for the anniversary of the 1912 birth of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and named after his birthplace, is the country’s national taekwondo championship.
Photo: AFP
Taekwondo is a professional sport in North Korea, which is a highly militaristic society. Kim Il-sung’s son and successor Kim Jong-il — father of present leader Kim Jong-un — developed a songun, or “military first” ideology, prioritizing the needs of the armed forces.
Taekwondo fighters train full-time for provincial teams and dominate their country’s version of the world championships.
However, they do not take part in the Olympic Games, where the sport has been riven by politically driven schisms. The International Olympic Committee recognizes World Taekwondo, a rival governing body based in South Korea (in 2017, it dropped the word “Federation” from its name, due to the unfortunate acronym “WTF”).
The sport was developed and codified by South Korean General Choi Hong-hi, who amalgamated Korean and Asian martial arts, with an emphasis on mental discipline, into what he called taekwondo — the art of the hand and the foot.
However, after falling out with South Korea’s military-backed dictator Park Chung-hee, he went into self-imposed exile and later became a frequent visitor to Pyongyang, where he died in 2002.
Even so, Yikyora — translated as “Fight” in North Korea — is a cry of encouragement on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula.
In the breaking event, the boards have to be hit with sufficient force and exactly in the middle, both horizontally and vertically, to split them apart, making it a test of precision as well as power, a guide at Taekwon-do Hall in Pyongyang said.
Anything else and the boards remain intact, and failure — which appeared to be the more common outcome at the contest — is even more painful than success.
After their attempts, the athletes limped away or inspected the damage to their callused hands, their knuckles swollen from years of punching the plastic target, trying to hide the agony throbbing through their limbs.
“It hurts,” said Rim, from Pyongyang. “If you train regularly, it hurts a bit, but if you try to break the boards without regular training, it hurts a lot.”
“I did not visualize the board as my enemy,” he added. “If a player is mentally ready to break the board at any cost, his hand will be more powerful.”
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