Fair answer. While I do not subscribe to the idea that a guy who does sport taekwondo will somehow try to make a self defense scenario into a sporting event (as some do maintain), I do think that the person who trains towards a specific goal consistently will be the best suited to achieve that goal. Thus the guys and gals who train sport TKD as their main or only program I would expect to excel and to do better than a guy or gal from a traditional school. On the other hand, if you spend all of your classes training to deal with a less constricted attack scenario, you will be better equipped to do so than the 80-100% sport trained athlete. This is assuming that both the traditional and the sport student meeting or exceeding an acceptable level of fitness, including cardio.1. I suppose I could respond to your OP by saying that you should see how long your comp team guy lasts against a guy from a hard core SD school with minimal rules and full contact, but I think that that would be a silly and childish response.
2. The whole contention of the SD oriented posters who dislike the sport is that sport taekwondo is not self defense, and in the case of the WTF rule set, really bears no resemblance to the Kukki taekwondo that it is connected to. This is almost never addressed by the folks who press the sport on the board here.
Seeing as healthy debate is what you said you are after, how do you address this?
My response
1. Some would do well others not so well. We do some SD training but it is limited. Most of our students come from tough backgrounds so they learned to fight out of need.
Of course as the saying goes, on any given Sunday....
Given that taekwondo was developed as a martial art for use protecting one's self and is actually more hands heavy in terms of technique count and does not resemble in any meaningful way WTF sport taekwondo, and given that it came first, do you think that WTF sport taekwondo should even be labeled taekwondo?2. I agree with you! Most of what is done in sport tkd is not applicable in SD. The cardio it develops and the ability to adjust to an attacker can be of help. I have said this many times in multiple posts. Sport TKD and SD are for the most part Apples and Oranges. I respect both.
No right or wrong answer; I have no investment in the answer, though I do personally think that it should be called something else.
My reason is that Kukki taekwondo has a much, much larger curriculum set than WTF sport, most of which is inapplicable in WTF sport. Chang Hon resembles WTF sport even less and is older than Kukki TKD. I would assume that Songham TKD has the same dichotomy with ATA and WTF sport.
Thoughts?
Daniel