Team Taiwan earned the country two gold medals last night, as the nation's Taekwondo fighters kicked their way into athletic history.
Men's Taekwondo fighter Chu Mu-yen (
Chu, 22-years-old and 173cm tall, and Chen, 26-years-old and 166cm tall, reached the finals after beating their opponents during the first two rounds.
In the semifinals, Chen handily defeated Canada's Ivett Gonda with a score of 3-2 and qualified to fight against Cuba's Yanelis Yuliet Labrada Diaz in the finals, who she also defeated.
When the referee raised Chen's hand to announce her victory, hundreds of Taiwanese people who were attending the competition waved flags and screamed with excitement.
Chu defeated Egyptian athlete Tamer Bayoumi to get a shot at the gold medal. He faced Oscar Francisco Salazar Blanco of Mexico.
Chen easily defeated Nepal's Sangina Baidya with a score 4-0 during the preliminary round. Chen was faster than her opponent, and she continually used her left leg for simple kicks without a lot of window dressing.
Meanwhile, during the quarterfinal, Chen faced a tough challenge from Columbia's Gladys Alicia Mora-Romero, and the athletes reached a draw after two rounds with 0-0.
Though Chen displayed a more positive performance, adopting different movements of roundhouse technical kicks, and left and right wing attacks, yet Mora-Romero reacted with a cautious tactic to ignore Chen's lure movements.
Just like those previous international Taekwondo session, protests against the referees' unfairness from losers interfered the games. Thailand and Austria both protested to the Olympic Organization Committee. Thailand's coach even temporarily stood in the ring and refused to leave while the second quarterfinal was in progress.
In the Men's under-58kg, Chu who is nicknamed the "warlord" of Taiwan, knocked out his first opponent, Libya's Ezedin Salem, within one minute at the preliminary round.
Chu scored four points with three offensive kicks, including a direct attack on Salem's face, bloodying his nose.
Egypt's Tamer Bayoumi and Greece's Michalis Mouroutsos both smoothly crushed their initial opponents in the preliminary round, to contend with each other in the quarterfinal.
Though thousands of Greek supporters cheered on Mouroutsos, who became a Greek national hero after winning the 2000 Sydney Olympic Taekwondo gold medal, the Egyptian athlete demonstrated his skills to win the match with a score of 10-3.
Chu proved his reputation by beating Spain's Juan Ramos in the quarterfinal match 9-1.
Chu's coach Liou Ching-wen (
"The only factor we were worrying about was an unfair judgment by the referee," Liou said.
He stressed that if any "particular" referee had tried to "manipulate" the results of the competition, he would have launched a strong protest in front of the international media.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
THUGGISH BEHAVIOR: Encouraging people to report independence supporters is another intimidation tactic that threatens cross-strait peace, the state department said China setting up an online system for reporting “Taiwanese independence” advocates is an “irresponsible and reprehensible” act, a US government spokesperson said on Friday. “China’s call for private individuals to report on alleged ‘persecution or suppression’ by supposed ‘Taiwan independence henchmen and accomplices’ is irresponsible and reprehensible,” an unnamed US Department of State spokesperson told the Central News Agency in an e-mail. The move is part of Beijing’s “intimidation campaign” against Taiwan and its supporters, and is “threatening free speech around the world, destabilizing the Indo-Pacific region, and deliberately eroding the cross-strait status quo,” the spokesperson said. The Chinese Communist Party’s “threats