Let's just pause to catch our breath and summarize what we've learned so far.

Martial arts in Korea has a long history, most of which was probably lost during repressive occupations by the Chinese and more recently the Japanese.

The modern art had it's birth in the early 1950's led by General Choi Hong Hi. When General Choi fell out of political favour he started his own organization, the International Taekwondo Federation (ITF). ITF style is a traditional style martial art resembling karate in its balanced emphasis on kata (hyung), breaking, self-defense, and sparring. The striking difference was the variety of and emphasis on kicking techniques. Choi spread ITF taekwondo to about 60 countries in the late 60's and early 70's.

The Korean TaeKwonDo Association changed its name to the World TaeKwonDo Federation (WTF) and in a major nationalistic push spead to over 150 countries around the world and rapidly took steps to distance itself from its Japanese roots. Much greater emphasis was placed on the sport aspect of taekwondo and the rules modified make their sparring style completeyl unique. When Korea held the Olympic Games in 1988 admitted WTF Taekwondo as a demonstration sport. Under the leadership of Dr. Un-Yong Kim (a Member of International Olympic Committee for Korea, President-Founder of the World Taekwondo Federation, President of the Korean Olympic Committee and Honorary President of the International World Games Association. He is also President of the Organizing Committees of the 2002 Asian Games in Busan) it became a full medal sport in 1992. It has a unique sparring system and has gradually become the dominant style of taekwondo currently practiced.

We talked about the fact that all of martial arts, in the grand scheme of things, is a minority activity.

We've discussed the idea that identification of taekwondo as a sport is not per se a bad idea in that for many purposes the ideology and personal development goals of sports and the martial arts are similar. And in fact one of the criticisms of almost all non-lethal forms of combat/sparring is that the rules make these activities into games. Because the question is how can you demonstrate that you could apply lethal force if you can't practice doing just that [sudden scarcity of sparring partners]. Many of the arts that lay claim to that potential simply do not hold tournaments [for example, Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu].

And indeed many would argue that with the sportification of many of the martial has come rapid development in training, technique, and skill, while encouraging and even allowing mass participation. This makes a certain amount of crude sense. It would seem unreasonable, as a generalization, especially in the democratized world to suggest that everything we could know about the martial arts was discovered hundreds or thousands of years ago and no one has made any progress since then.

Of course I could also argue that lessons learned from the real thing are not the same as lessons learned in the safety of the dojo or the ring -- but that's a debate that I'm sure I can leave in the capable hands of those more garrulous than I.