Local karate team’s international participation cancelled

The Nelspruit Wadoryu Karate and Taekwando was supposed to represent South Africa in the European Championship competition that is expected to be held in Netherlands

It has since decided it would be a waste of money because the games are focusing on Europe.

Team instructor, Job Magagula said they felt honoured to have received an invitation from another country.

“First of all, let me indicate that we feel honoured to have received such invitation, but we are not going to be part of the championship games because it’s for Europe and we still have a lot of competitions ahead.

We also want to develop taekwando and karate as a sport and martial arts.”

“On March 29 the club will participate in the Taekwando International Nation Championship in Pretoria. At this stage we are busy preparing our children for this event,“ he said.

Last year the club managed to put this province on the map after they brought home eight medals from the Fourth National Championship held in Pretoria. ”We are starting to prepare our children because we want to do our best to ensure that we put our beautiful province on the map,“ he said.

This publication learnt that the province will host the First Mpumalanga Taekwando Championship in the capital city in May.

While most people are not familiar with this type of sport and this newspaper noticed that many sporting coaches did not get the opportunity to develop as some indicated that lack of funding was a challenge, but Magagula told this reporter that they wanted to take this sport to another level very soon when they establish clubs at KaBokweni and Barberton. Currently the club is struggling to survive on the club fees per month which is R200 per pupil.