The World Taekwondo Federation has organized a World Taekwondo Grand Slam in order to promote the sport and enlarge its presence in the world as a more media-friendly, spectator-centric sport. This series will see major monetary prizes being awarded to the winners of each category which tallies into a good total of USD 800,000/-.
The series will kick off by the end of 2017 and proceed into the early months of 2018. President of the World Taekwondo Federation – Chungwon Choue and Director General Jin-Bang Yang at the press conference along with Shuying Zheng and Shuai Zhao who are high ranking officials of the Chinese Olympic Committee, announced that this series will be held in Wuxi, China where the venue will also see action of this series up until 2020.
Eight separate tournaments will be held under this grand slam series and each Olympic Taekwondo weight category will be represented. The winner of each weight category will take home USD 70,000/- while the silver medalist will be awarded USD 20,000/- and the bronze medalist – a sum of USD 10,000/-. In addition to these grand prizes, steps have been taken to further strengthen the elitist nature of this high-end grand slam series by limiting the event to a strictly invitational basis which will see only 12 premier athletes in each tournament/weight category.
Thus, the invited athletes in each tournament and weight category will be the 2016 Rio Olympic gold medalists of the respective categories, the gold medalists from the 2017 World Taekwondo Championship, the champions of the Grand-Prix Final which will be held in December, the three winners of the Grand-Prix series held earlier this year and the winner of the 2016 Grand-Prix Final. In the case of an overlapping of players in winning multiple titles in different tournaments, the players ranked next to these specified players will be invited. The ranking system followed here will be the World Taekwondo Olympic Rankings.
Furthermore, to spice things up a bit, a clause has been included to allow the host country one “wild card” where the last three athletes in each tournament/category will be selected in a pre-Grand Slam qualification tournament. Interestingly, these athletes have space to come out from different disciplines of combat sports although in the qualification tournament and in the Grand Slam series they will be restricted to following the standard Taekwondo rules.
Thus, the global Taekwondo arena will have a new tit-bit to munch on as this new Elite Grand Slam Series will add to the excitement and will be an event much looked forward to.
