Analysis of the scoring system in Taekwondo

Abstract

Olympic Sport since Sidney-2000, Taekwondo is a contact sport determined by a fight between two athletes through techniques of blows with the feet and the hands. The result of the fight depends entirely on the evaluation of three referees that attribute points to the athletes pressing one of four buttons every time that a referee judges that an athlete hit the other with a valid technique. To be a valid point, attributed to an athlete, at least two referees must press equivalent buttons in a 3 sec time interval. The objective of this study was to analyze the refereeing system of Taekwondo to verify its robustness against plausible changes in the rules. We quantified the number of markings under reasonable criteria and calculated the percentage of occasions in which the result would be inverted. During three official competitions, we collected the raw scores of 141 fights, in which 5418 markings had been entered, and 3725 officialized as points, with an average of 12 markings per judge per fight, of which 8.5 (70%) became valid points. On average there were 17% inversions (official results that would be inverse according to point validation criterion), considering scores as general (grand total) markings, individual or in pairs. The results indicate a significant number of fights inversions. We conclude that is necessary trying to minimize the influence of a given referee, as the WTF attempted recently by modifying the rules and adding a fourth referee to judge the punctuation of the athletes