Original title: The Chinese taekwondo team won the mixed team championship in the World Taekwondo World Cup Finals.
The 2023 World Taekwondo Team World Cup Finals was held in Wuxi Economic Development Zone on the 19th. After a day of fierce competition, the Chinese team stood out from the 9 participating teams and won the championship strongly, with Uzbekistan winning the second place, Brazil and South Korea's Daejeon City Hall winning the third place.
Since this event is a direct qualification for the mixed team exhibition event of the Paris Olympic Games, according to the pre-competition regulations, the champion Chinese team and the runner-up Uzbekistan team are the first to lock in the qualification for the taekwondo mixed team exhibition event of the Paris Olympic Games. The two third-place teams will be judged based on the total points advantage of the whole game, and Brazil will be the last place to go straight to Paris.
The World Taekwondo Team World Cup Championship is an event founded in Wuxi, and the World Taekwondo Federation will settle the World Cup Finals in Wuxi every year. At present, the taekwondo mixed team event has become an Olympic performance event for two consecutive years (Tokyo and Paris), and has become an official competition event in the Asian Games and Youth Olympic Games, and the Chinese team won the championship in this year's Hangzhou Asian Games.
In this competition, the Chinese team sent Song Jie, Zhou Zeqi, Xing Jiani, Cui Yang, Xiang Qizhang and Meng Mingkuan to participate in the competition. According to the rules of the mixed team competition, athletes can only be composed of two men and two women in each game, and two female generals, Song Jie and Zhou Zeqi, and two male generals, Cui Yang and Meng Mingkuan, formed the final team against the Uzbekistan team. According to the principle of male and female, from light to heavy, the four athletes were numbered from 1 to 4.
The match is divided into three innings. The first game is 4 minutes long and is played in a traditional team format, with players playing with the same number as each other in order from light to heavy, with each pair playing for 1 minute. The last two rounds are 3 minutes each. The game is played in a free rotation format. In a match, the gender of the two athletes should match. There is no limit to the number of substitutions, but your player should play for at least 15 seconds before making a substitution.
In the first game, Song Jie, who took the lead, scored consecutive headshots to help the Chinese team start 9:0. However, the Uzbekistan team, which has good strength, has continued to chase points since then, once overtaking 14:10, Cui Yang scored a valuable 3 points in the last moments of his game, and then Meng Mingkuan scored another 3 points, and the Chinese team led 16:14 in the first game. In the second game, the two teams played very closely, and the score also took the lead alternately, and the two games were tied at 20.
After the third game was tied at 24, the Chinese team suddenly made a strong effort, and several players performed extremely well, scoring 11 points in a row to lay the foundation for victory. In the end, the Chinese team won 36:30 and won the championship.
Zhou Zeqi said after the game that the main reason for winning this game is that everyone unites and implements the tactics arranged by the coach. Meng Mingkuan, who participated in the team competition for the first time, said that his task was not to let the other party score, "the performance is okay".
Starting from December 13, the 2023 World Taekwondo Grand Slam Championship Series Qualifiers, the 2023 World Taekwondo Grand Slam Series Main Event, and the 2023 World Taekwondo Team World Cup Championship Finals will be held one after another. The first two events resulted in eight individual qualifications for taekwondo and three for the mixed team events. In a total of five competition days, the Chinese team gained a lot in the blessed land of Wuxi Economic Development Zone, winning the men's 68 kg, women's 57 kg, 67 kg and above Olympic main event direct cards, and obtained a direct Olympic quota for the mixed team Olympic exhibition event.
*: China News Network].