Shut out in Jakarta, Pinoy jins set sights on SEAG, Olympics

After what it felt was a satisfying showing in the Asian Games in Indonesia, the Philippine taekwondo jins shift their focus on the next big battles ahead, including next year’s Southeast Asian Games on home soil and qualifiers for the 2020 Olympics.

“For our Kyorugi team, we are already gearing up and preparing for next year’s events such as world championships and SEA Games and a few more international events. This is leading up already to 2020 Tokyo. Efforts will be given on the aspects of sports science,” head coach Igor Mella told The STAR yesterday.

“The poomsae team is still preparing for this November’s World Championships in Taipei and we’re already forming the teams and specific players for next year’s SEA Games,” he added.

The jins produced three bronze medals to the Phl cause in the 2018 Asiad, with Pauline Lopez making a podium finish in kyorugi women’s -57kg division and the poomsae teams of Dustin Mella, Jeordan Domingez and Rodolfo Reyes, Jr. (men’s) and Juvenile Crisostomo, Rinna Babanto and Jana Oliva (women’s) duplicating the feat in their side of the competition.

“Our team did well considering the new things implemented in the taekwondo event,” Mella said.

After Lopez, Arven Alcantara (men’s -68kg), Samuel Morrison (men’s -80kg), Jessica Canabal (women’s -49kgs) and Darlen Arpon (men’s -67kgs) went only the quarterfinals.

“For the Kyorugi, we had several challenging matches with top ranked players mostly in the quarterfinals. One-point differences in three events we joined. This means that we had good matches in terms of skill level. Just the breaks of the game,” said Mella.”Our poomsae team, for their part, did very well in their performance especially the team events which we consider as our forte,” he said.