The Open Dutch 2019 edition was held on Saturday the 26th of January. This year we decided to move the tournament to a Saturday, instead of the traditional Sunday, to accommodate our foreign competitors. Many had told us that travel would be easier for them. Looking at the registrations that was definitely the case. At the 2018 event we had 600 competitors, comparing that to the 770 competitors this year I think it is fair to say we made a huge jump. Especially in the black belt category there was a strong growth in competitor numbers.
With 1400+ entries most competitors actually participated in multiple disciplines. These competitors came from 18 different countries and brought 74 umpires, to once again support the 10 rings we had set up in a single hall. This is a request for the 2020 event, I would like to ask every team to please bring the required number of umpires, we cannot run a successful event without umpires.
Once again, we had a huge list of top competitors from all over the world. We were impressed at the 2018 edition, but the 2019 edition had an even longer list of top-ranking competitors. Let’s list some of the winners here that stood out to us
The Tuls competition was largely dominated by Norway and Finland. From Norway Espen Drange and Marielle Lind won the gold medal for 4th – 6th degree blackbelts. For the juniors both the 1st and 2nd degree blackbelts were huge groups. Christopher Lau and Steinkjer Ingebrigt took home the gold medal in the male category, female category was won by Jemma Swinburne and Mira Sjoval respectively.
Female sparring was dominated by The Netherlands, with Sam Delrock, Maartje Gubbels, Shannon Wouters and Nina Meppelder taking home the gold. For male sparring the gold medals went home to competitors from different parts of the world. Michael McRoberts from Scotland, Jorg Gubbels from The Netherlands and Bartosz Slokowski from Poland won their respective categories and had exciting fights!
The overall sparring competition was very exciting once again. Some surprising results in these categories:
- Junior -55 female – Yra Labrie
- Junior +55 female – Larisa Zagar Slemensek
- Junior -62 male – Peter Rickards
- Junior +62 male Kamil Falowski
- Senior -62 female – Maartje Gubbels
- Senior +62 female – Nina Meppelder
- Senior -70 male – Vitali Solovey
- Senior +70 male – Danylo Demchyshyn
For those interested in statistics, here are the top 5 countries and teams.
Countries:
- The Netherlands
- Finland
- Norway
- Ireland
- Ukraine
Teams:
- All Ukraine Taekwon-do Union
- Koguryo
- Team Carvalho/ TS Amsterdam
- River Valley Newlands Taekwon-do
- Difesa Sports
All results for all categories can be found on Sportdata here:
If you don’t want to miss out on next year’s edition, make sure to follow our Facebook page to find out when it will be, we will announce this soon and we will also share hotel booking codes for a nice discount. (https://www.facebook.com/OpenDutch/) Also, our website has links to all the various photo pages for those who are curious what it looked like and will have the latest news for those not on Facebook. (http://open-dutch.nl/)
We want to thank all of our volunteers, visitors, competitors, coaches and referees and we hope to see you all at the “Open Dutch Championships 2020” on Saturday 25th of January 2020 in Helmond.
Master Willy van de Mortel
Open Dutch Taekwon-do Championships