This year has been somewhat of an eventful year for the Karate fraternity in the island as the sport has been recognized by the International Olympics Committee as a competition to be featured in the Olympics Games.
The most recent main events in the Sri Lankan Karate calendar were the tour of Kazakhstan by the National Karate team where they took part in the Asian Karate Championship and the South Asian Championship which was hosted by the Sri Lanka Karate Federation last month.
The Sri Lankan national team could not achieve much at the Asian Karate Championship which was dominated by Iran, who dethroned Japan from a consecutively held Asian title. The highlight of the overall tour performance in Kazakhstan was Paluraj’s performance in his Male Kata event in which he beat internationally renowned Kuznetsov Aleksandr of Kyrgyztan and his Pakistani opponent to qualify for the quarter finals, where he could not make it past Uzbekistan’s Abdullaev Doniyorbek.
In contrast to this however, Sri Lanka’s performance at the recently concluded South Asian Karate Championship was exceptional where the Sri Lanka Air Force airmen along with the airwomen clinched both category titles of the overall championship with a total tally of 1 gold, 8 silvers and 1 bronze medals.
With these events coming to an end, the National Sports Festival, the Sri Lanka Schools’ All Island Karate Tournament and the Sri Lanka Nationals are the upcoming events with the All Island Schools tournament and the National tournament being the 2 most looked forward to local karate events. The All Island Schools tournament will be held on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of October while the Nationals tournament will be held on the 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th of October.
