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August 21, 2006 - 02:44 AM webmaster - webmaster@2006karateworldcup.com.au in reply: G'Day Paz, How to respond to a general accusation from an anonymous source? Which particular decisions were unfair and/or bias? Or are you saying they all were? When observing a bout as a spectator/supporter, each strike by your fighter appears to hit home (almost) whereas the strikes by the opponent appear as being deflected/blocked/ineffectual. When the decision is against you, you may say "bias" or that your opponent was "lucky". But who in reality was the better fighter? Everyone has some bias, especially spectators and supporters, and the officials would not be exempt from this. They are only human after all. However, we do try to provide a system to minimize any bias and, hopefully and mostly, arrive at choosing the better fighter of the two within each bout. All the officials have received training apart from having participated as fighters in previous tournaments and achieved the rank of shodan and above. Thus they all know what it is like to be competitors and how previous officials had judged their own bouts. It would be not uncommon for the official themselves to have felt that their own fight was at some time judged unfairly. This reason alone motivates most, if not all, officials to endeavour to be as impartial as practicable when deciding a bout. Nonetheless, mistakes can and do happen and we try to mitigate such situations. There are four corner judges and one referee for each bout with (five) different perspectives of the fighting. There must be at least three votes (ie, a majority decision) for a particular competitor in order for them to win. In the absence of "wazari" (half point) or "ippon" (full point), the officials have to make a decision based on other criteria - attack, defense, technique, spirit, etc. And where the decision is close, two pairs of corner judges may vote for two different opponents and then the referee would have the deciding vote. In this way, we trust that if one or two officials are mistaken we can, at least, achieve a reasonable result. In summary, we can only but strive our best to protect the fighters (from each other and themselves!), enforce the rules (of engagement) and give them an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. There is much more to this topic that can be covered here and many academic papers have been devoted to the study of what influences referee decisions (in different sports). When there have been any failing, we welcome the opportunity to correct it. As Sosai says ".. always see contemplation of your actions as an opportunity to improve". Osu! IP : 202.20.73.30 |