UK Sport

• You are here:
• Media Centre
• News

Technology Partnership Benefits Taekwondo

Subscribe

BAE Systems 27 May 2008

When the Great Britain taekwondo team won an unprecedented four medals at the 2008 European Championships, it was a triumph of technique, training – and technology.

The Championships, held in Rome in April, saw the first use in competition of an electronic scoring vest that recorded successful kicks and punches. Keen to make sure their players fully understood how the new system would work, the team management approached BAE Systems’ Advanced Technology Centre (ATC) for an evaluation of the vest. The project took place as part of the five-year technology partnership agreed between UK Sport and BAE Systems earlier this year.

Gary Hall, the team’s Performance Director, said that after using the new vest in training, they realised there were inconsistencies in the way it registered scoring hits: “We could see that we really needed to understand how the vest worked so that we could use the most efficient techniques and tactics during the competition,” he said. The team made a video showing hits that scored and those that didn’t, and sent it, along with one of the vests, to the ATC for testing. There was one problem, though: the team was leaving for the tournament in a matter of days, and they needed the analysis to be done in just 48 hours.

BAE Systems scientist Dr George Simpson conducted the tests, breaking a vest down into its components and applying equal pressure to all parts of it using an impact tower – usually used for tasks such as testing composite materials resistance to impact.

What he found was that different parts of the vest had slightly different sensitivities, with the upper edge of the vest giving higher readings than other areas. “The differences were very subtle, but they were there,” he said. George presented the team coaches with his findings, and then they set to work to apply what he had learned to a competition environment. “We put a vest on a heavy bag and spent a few hours with team members kicking and punching it to see how to translate what I had found in the lab into the real world. The controlled test conditions we create in the laboratory needed to be verified and qualified in real world situations, so it was important to put the two together to get an accurate picture of the vest’s performance.”

Gary said the lessons learned from BAE Systems’ study allowed the team to adjust their training to suit the methods needed to score on the vest. “Because more force was needed to score on certain parts of the vest, we adjusted our tactics to accommodate that. Taekwondo is traditionally a game of attack and counter, and if you are attacking you generally generate more force than if you are kicking while moving backwards. We found that to score well using the vest required a move towards a more static game, with more of an emphasis on straight power.

“It certainly worked very well. We took three medals on the first day, which was unheard of, and we took another medal on the second day. We only took eight players, none of them from our Olympic team, so it was phenomenal progress.

“We were able to benefit from BAE Systems’ world renowned engineering skills and that gave us a little bit of an edge over our opponents. It was great to be able to call on an organisation like BAE Systems that could turn its engineering skills to bear to benefit the British team.”

Gary went on to explain that the vest analysed by the ATC is similar to another now being trialled in competition, “It’s a priority focus for the World Taekwondo Federation to have electronic scoring in place for the 2012 Olympics, which means they have until next year to decide which system they’ll use.”

Under the technology partnership with UK Sport, BAE Systems is providing expertise in areas such as structural and mechanical engineering, aerodynamics and materials science to some of Britain’s major medal-winning sports.

UK Sport’s Research and Innovation Consultant Scott Drawer said: “BAE Systems’ expertise have been utilised in this situation to enable a rapid response to a performance need for taekwondo. This is a great example of how our partnership with BAE Systems will benefit British sport over the next five years.”

The deal is a value-in-kind activity brokered by UK Sport, with BAE Systems’ expertise channelled directly into the areas of sports development where it is needed most. While it is worth about £1.5m in engineering time, the real value is in the ability for British sports to tap into the knowledge and expertise of BAE Systems’ 18,000 UK-based engineers.
 

Back to news listing

Most Viewed