I have friends from Black Belt factories here in St. Louis that are red and black belts, within a year and a half, that make more mistakes in poomsea than I do. And not to be demeaning but I am only a blue belt in TKD, which I was awarded in Dec. of 06. So that means I have Purple, Brown, Red, then Dan to go, I am a firm believer that slow and steady wins the race, I guess I am either a tortoise or retarded when it comes to getting rank. However, being an instructor I expect more out of myself just on principle. Not to mention that I wear two titanium custom fit leg braces that is part of the reason I was discharged from the USMC.
Yep you heard it straight from the horse's mouth......10 friends from 4 different black belt factories.:erg:
I've heard far too many stories like this to believe that it can be just accident, or coincidence, or the odd exception. And I've heard the rationales and justifications, too. So take the WTF: yes, it's a huge organization, no one's quality control is perfect... you know how the line goes. And they have a point, though not the one they think they're making. The real moral of the story is that there isn't a spoon long enough to keep you safe when you're supping with the particular devil that is the International Olympic Committee and its statellites and subsatellites. The IOC is way more huge as an organization than the WTF, and as far as I can tell is shot through with the same putrid corruption but on a still vaster scale. Remember that nasty buisness with the Canadian figure skaters who were downgraded because the unspeakable French judge had a deal with the equally unspeakable Russian org about vote-trading? Well, the villains got nailed there, but plenty of people who would know, many athletes among them, told us that that was just the tip of the iceberg. The Olympic world is filled with corruption and cynicism, and achieving Olympic status is maybe the worst thing that can happen to a MA—it guarantees that you are going to start hanging out, and horse-trading, with the master politicians of the sport world, and eventually will become just like them. Yum, yum.
And it's inevitable, given the fact that the WTF and the KKW are the twin MA instrumentalities of the Korean government, that the two are going to be basically reinforcing each other's game. Buyer, beware.