Chapter 18: Competitionalization

Sport Taekwondo gives value to the factors of power, accuracy, and strategy, and gives higher value to the use of more difficult techniques. It stresses that to execute a proper technique; you must have a resisting opponent. Because of the rules of sport sparring, it is possible to predict the actions of your opponent and to technically and psychologically manipulate and dominate your opponent.

Traditional Taekwondo stresses that the purpose of performing a technique properly is so that it may be used to strike with enough force to disable or possibly kill an opponent—the philosophy of "one strike, one kill." This is why traditionalists say they cannot use their techniques in contact competition, thus they cannot achieve this purpose during sparring. Instead, breaking is used to test the "lethality" of techniques.

Disagreements about what Taekwondo should become, led to a split between traditional Taekwondo (the martial art) and the new competitive Taekwondo (sport). Traditional Taekwondo is based almost entirely on Japanese principles, concepts, and techniques. Its four core training methods, patterns (poomse or hyung), breaking (kyukpa), sparring (kyorugi), and self-defense techniques (hoshinsul, are Japanese in origin. Sport Taekwondo did not develop the philosophies and concepts needed to supplant those that traditional Taekwondo adopted from karate, so it is still perceived as a subset of the original Taekwondo.

Taekwondo began to spread around the world.