Kees Yorkton took a small team of three competitors to the 29th Annual Grandmaster KH Min's tournament in Edmonton.
The event had over 300 competitors. Participating was Francis Bazin, Daniel Bazin and Zane Chopik.
"Daniel was having a great first match in the Midget advanced belt division.
He had a much taller stronger opponent but used his footwork well in avoiding being scored upon.
With 25 seconds to go Daniel was up 1-0," reports Master Wayne Mitchell, coach and instructor at Kees TaeKwonDo in Yorkton.
An exchange managed to find Daniel's opponent's knee hitting his thigh. This impeded his ability to continue to quickly get out of the way. The match ended 3-1 in favour of his opponent.
Francis competed in the black-belt-adult-welter-weight division.
"He did not have much of a chance to practice his many skills that he has been working on.
In the gold medal match within a couple of seconds we could see that Francis was way quicker than his taller opponent. Francis only needed two kicks to immobilize his opponent and win the gold medal at around the 15-second mark," recalls Mitchell, adding that he was actually hoping the match would go a little longer for experimental purposes.
"We would have liked him to play with his opponent a little more in order to experiment with new techniques, however like many games, domination is a great technique."
Zane Chopik was the third member of the Yorkton threesome in action that day, had a great day, says Mitchell.
"He started out winning gold medal in patterns in a large field of advanced red belts.
His sparring division found him needing three matches to participate in the gold medal match. Chopik performed extremely well winning his first match 7- 1, and his second match, 4-0".
His gold medal match was against a much taller opponent who packs as much of a punch os Chopik does, says Mitchell.
Chopik's opponent was of higher skill, he added, but Chopik managed to land "complicated techniques".
It was a good event for all three competitors who will also compete in the upcoming Prairie Wildfire Taekwondo Challenge in Yorkton on Saturday Oct. 27th at the Flexihall in the Gallagher Centre.
Susanne Mitchell was a referee ring captain for the day.
