Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 02:58:32 -0700 From: the_dojang-request@martialartsresource.net Subject: The_Dojang digest, Vol 14 #243 - 4 msgs X-Mailer: Mailman v2.0.13.cisto1 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Errors-To: the_dojang-admin@martialartsresource.net X-BeenThere: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13.cisto1 Precedence: bulk Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net X-Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net X-Subscribed-Address: kma@martialartsresource.com List-Id: The Internet's premier discussion forum on Korean Martial Arts. 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Copyright 1994-2007: Ray Terry and Martial Arts Resource The Internet's premier discussion forum devoted to Korean Martial Arts. 2,200 members. See the Korean Martial Arts (KMA) FAQ and the online search engine for back issues of The_Dojang at http://MartialArtsResource.com Pil Seung! Today's Topics: 1. RE: The best knife defense in the world, probably... (RICHARD LAWS (RICHARD.LAWS)) 2. Allegations of underage drinking & sexual harrassment (The_Dojang) 3. 7 years later (The_Dojang) 4. RE: Interesting Link (Thomas Gordon) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 09:26:58 +0100 From: "RICHARD LAWS (RICHARD.LAWS)" To: Subject: [The_Dojang] RE: The best knife defense in the world, probably... Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net ________________________________ There is always the most popular and more level-headed defense against knife attack that should be adopted by everyone. Its a really simple defense which is both legal and pacifist. RUN AWAY Richard Laws (Who propbably wouldn't heed his own advice) [demime 0.98e removed an attachment of type application/ms-tnef which had a name of winmail.dat] --__--__-- Message: 2 Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 07:39:35 -0700 From: The_Dojang To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] Allegations of underage drinking & sexual harrassment Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Cloud over taekwondo: Allegations of underage drinking, sexual harrassment emerge from some athletes BRIAN GOMEZ THE GAZETTE Colorado Springs, CO August 18, 2007 - 10:20PM Episodes of underage drinking and allegations of sexual assault have surfaced as U.S. taekwondo athletes and coaches head to the Olympic trials this week in Colorado Springs. Some national and junior national team members blame lax supervision by the governing body, Colorado Springs-based USA Taekwondo. USA Taekwondo's chief executive, David Askinas, said that in his 19 months on the job he has instituted a "zero tolerance" policy on underage drinking and sexual harassment and increased supervision of minors at overseas tournaments. He said he doesn't believe there's a problem with underage drinking or sexual harassment of younger athletes by coaches or older athletes. "We have coaches and team managers and trainers keeping an eye on them," Askinas said of underage team members. "We make sure we know where they are so that they're not out gallivanting around the town. They don't go places alone. We always make sure they go in a group. They're very tightly supervised on the road. We have obligations to their parents." 'IT'S A PARTY THING' But six current or former junior national team members interviewed by The Gazette said they participated in or witnessed underage athletes drinking during a junior national team trip 13 months ago to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Askinas and senior national team coaches Jean Lopez and Juan Moreno were the leaders on that trip. Emilia Morrow, a 15-year-old junior national team member, said she saw others drinking but did not join them. "There were a bunch of people," she said. "The coaches backed off. Once everyone was done fighting, they were like, 'We're done.'" The coaches, she said, "don't really care about us. They want good results. They went to their room, and they went to sleep." Cody Stanger, who was 17 at the time, said he and other team members drank in the hotel bar in Ho Chi Minh City after a party earlier in the night attended by athletes from other countries at the tournament. He said he sneaked out of his room after midnight and drank at the bar for a couple of hours. "It was just kids being dumb," Stanger said. "It wasn't the coaches' fault. The coaches had already done their responsibilities and had expected their team to follow the rules." The next morning, the team flew from Ho Chi Minh City to Hong Kong en route to home. During the layover, Stanger said, coaches saw that some team members were hung over and punished them by making them do push-ups and sit-ups before their flight back to the U.S. "It was one of those workouts to punish us," Stanger said. "We deserved it. It makes you think twice about screwing around at a function where you're ambassadors to America. You're supposed to be an adult, not a child." Stanger said neither he nor the coaches told his parents. Askinas said that "somewhere between four and six" junior national team members were involved in the drinking during the Vietnam trip, and said the punishment under his self-proclaimed zero-tolerance policy was appropriate because they were first-time offenders. "That was the only competition for the junior team that year," Askinas said. "Removing them from the team would have been a meaningless gesture because they were done. The coaches felt the punishment and the lectures that we had were appropriate for a first offense." The 20-person junior national team has athletes as young as 14. Three underage athletes are on the 16-person senior national team, and there have been more in the past. "Whenever you have 15- or 16-year-old girls hanging out with 20-something-year-old guys and you're drinking and everyone is not themselves, there are going to be problems," said Kay Poe, a member of the U.S. taekwondo team in the 2000 Olympics. Poe was a national team member from 1996 to 2003. "It's a party thing. Whenever the tournaments are over, the whole point is to drink and let loose from all the training. I did it a lot. I did it almost every tournament." Simone DeVito, a 19-year-old national team member and former junior national team member, said underage drinking was common. "Every trip, there has been underage drinking," she said. "I've definitely seen it happen. I just try to stay away from it." Do coaches or administrators stop underage drinking? "Before the trip, they always say, 'Let's keep it conservative and appropriate,'" DeVito said. "But I don't think they follow through. I don't think they follow through at all. It's said, but they either don't check up on it or they won't correct someone if they ever saw something happening." Along with underage drinking has come allegations of sexual assault or situations that put younger girls in close contact with older male teammates or coaches. Poe said that while drinking underage, she sometimes had sex with older national team members. It is illegal to have sex with an underage person even if that person gives consent. The age of consent varies between states. Poe, now 25, declined to identify her partners. Several national team members said it's common for them to move among the hotel rooms assigned to the U.S. squad without being supervised by coaches. "If you're not watching for yourself, nobody else is," DeVito said. "You have to make sure you're OK." A WOMAN'S STORY A former national team member told The Gazette of a situation that she said was not OK. Five-time national champion Mandy Meloon was dropped from the national team in April, nearly a year after she complained to USA Taekwondo that Lopez forced himself on her at a tournament in 1997 in Egypt. Lopez, a competitor at the time, denied the accusation, and USA Taekwondo announced in March of this year that it had extended Lopez's contract after deciding Meloon's complaint had no merit. Meloon says she wants to compete at the 2008 Beijing Games. She is a two-time bronze medalist in the world championships. But she has been dumped from the national team, and at age 26, she describes herself as broke and homeless. Meloon said this month that she had taken up residence at a women's shelter in Houston. Meloon had one of the longest — and, she said, most tumultuous — tenures on the national team. Meloon said Lopez acted inappropriately toward her when she attended a camp at the Olympic Training Center when she was 13 and then again after she made the national team and moved to the OTC at 15. Lopez, seven years older than Meloon, was a national team member also living at the OTC. U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman Darryl Seibel said each sport's governing body is responsible for assigning someone to supervise athletes during camps at the OTC. USA Taekwondo hasn't had a resident-athlete program at the OTC since June 2004, when the USOC shut it down, citing a slew of problems — mismanagement and financial woes were most prominent — with the national governing body. In March 1997, just after Meloon turned 16, she traveled with the national team to Cairo for a World Cup tournament. According to a police report Meloon filed a decade later, she was in bed asleep when Lopez knocked on her hotel room door. Meloon said Lopez crawled between her and Kay Poe, Meloon's roommate, on twin beds that had been pushed together. Meloon said Lopez groped her, then went to the bathroom and left the room. "I did not like it, and it was wrong," Meloon told The Gazette. "He knew it." Meloon said she didn't say anything to Lopez during the incident because she was afraid. "I should have just got up," she said. "I didn't want to get in trouble. He was the captain of the team." Lopez said he wasn't drinking that night and can't remember if he entered Meloon's room. "I was never inappropriate with her. Never did I put her in a compromising position," Lopez said. "Could I have been in their room? Sure. But I could have been in anyone's room. She's painting a specific picture that I went into her room and molested her. That part is absolutely not true." Poe said she fell asleep after Lopez entered the room and didn't witness inappropriate conduct by Lopez with Meloon or recall Meloon giving specific details of the allegedly inappropriate conduct. But Poe did say she remembered Meloon discussing the episode at the time. "It was 10 years ago, and I don't remember the night at all," Poe said. "I do remember her talking about it. It wasn't like she was all scarred. It was like a joke, like, 'I can't believe Jean did this!' Like making fun of him." Meloon did not report the incident to national team officials or Cairo police at the time. And despite the alleged assault, two years later Meloon began training at Elite Taekwondo Center, a Houston-area establishment owned in part by Lopez. Not until May 2006 did Meloon file a grievance with USA Taekwondo that detailed the alleged incident in Cairo, called for Lopez's dismissal as national team coach and requested women coaches for the team. 'REALLY HORRIBLE CHOICE' Rita Smith, executive director of the Denver-based National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said women whose abusers are in control of their careers face a "really horrible choice. They could either give up their dreams or let the victimization continue." Smith said every victim has to weigh her options and decide whether coming forward will stop the abuse, and whether speaking up will cause other problems. She said it's unusual to wait 10 years to report an incident, but added, "I don't think there's a standard. Women report when they feel like they'll get support or be believed." Meloon was not believed by USA Taekwondo. Askinas said a three-month investigation in 2006 concluded that Meloon's allegations "weren't credible," and there was no reason to fire Lopez. Meloon resumed training at Elite in January of this year, although she said she did not want to be alone with Lopez. By Feb. 5, Meloon, Lopez and Askinas completed the signing of a document stating that "any and all claims related to the issues previously raised by Ms. Meloon" had been "fully and finally resolved." Then in March, Meloon said, she suffered a broken facial bone during a national team qualifying event in Dallas. Despite her injury, Meloon won the match to qualify for the world championships. She said that because of the injury, she practiced only once more at Elite. Lopez and Askinas said Meloon's failure to practice was grounds to drop her from the national team, a move completed April 24. On April 30, Meloon filed a sexual battery complaint against Lopez regarding the 1997 episode with police in Palm Bay, Fla., where she was living at the time. The police report says an officer and a detective recommended Meloon contact Colorado Springs police because Meloon, Lopez and the team were based here in 1997. Meloon has not filed a complaint in Colorado Springs. She told The Gazette on April 30 that she did not think she could compete at the world championships because of her injury and the psychological and physical stress of being homeless and broke. She later changed her mind and got an arbitration hearing seeking reinstatement to the national team. The arbitrator, Lawrence A. Saichek, ruled against Meloon on May 14, finding that USA Taekwondo was justified in dropping her from the team because she had stopped training and had made derogatory statements about USA Taekwondo officials, coaches and team members on a Web site. The USA Taekwondo athlete code of conduct states in part, "One will maintain a positive attitude and act in a way that will bring honor to oneself, the staff, the sport of Taekwondo, USA Taekwondo and the United States of America." But Saichek ordered USA Taekwondo to pay for the cost of the hearing and criticized USA Taekwondo and the USOC. "This Arbitrator hopes that the USOC and USAT do not abandon Ms. Meloon as a result of her recent actions," Saichek wrote. "She was, in essence, raised by the USOC and is a product of their system. "Ms. Meloon's core message went to the protection of the young girls in the Olympic movement who could be exposed to situations that are inappropriate and potentially damaging," Saichek continued. "One would hope that this message is not lost and young children are properly supervised, protected and educated. One would hope that the USOC takes a serious look at the level of social interaction between its coaches and athletes and underage drinking by its athletes. One would hope that the circumstances leading to the suspension of Ms. Meloon will not re-occur in the life of another young Olympic hopeful. Although Ms. Meloon must be held accountable for her actions, one must wonder about the culpability of the system as a whole." Askinas disputed Saichek's conclusion. "He made the mistake of accepting her misrepresentations as dead-accurate facts," Askinas said, referring to Saichek and Meloon. "He ruled in our favor before we even began cross-examination. We never had a chance to cross-examine her on those facts, and some, if not all, of them, we're very skeptical about." Saichek did not respond to requests for comment on Askinas' assertions. "We take issue with what he had to say," Askinas said. "It's not a criticism of our current organization. Since the organization has been USAT, we've been very careful with our athletes." --__--__-- Message: 3 Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 07:45:55 -0700 From: The_Dojang To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Subject: [The_Dojang] 7 years later Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net Catching up with 2 athletes linked in lore - 7 years later BRIAN GOMEZ THE GAZETTE Colorado Spgs, CO August 19, 2007 - 1:45AM HOUSTON - Esther Kim and Kay Poe became linked in Olympic lore on May 20, 2000, when Kim forfeited a match at the Olympic Training Center to hand Poe a spot on the U.S. taekwondo team headed to the Summer Games in Sydney. The story of friendship, sacrifice and sportsmanship spun around the world. Kim appeared on "Oprah" and in People and Cosmo Girl magazines. Taekwondo, which debuted as a medal sport in Sydney, never had so much publicity in the United States. But at least in Poe's case, the feel-good story morphed into a grittier reality. Poe, now 25, hoped to redeem herself at the 2004 Athens Games after losing her first and only match in Sydney but left taekwondo in 2003 because a "really bad" eating disorder sent her in and out of hospitals, she said during a May interview. Strapped for cash, Poe said she danced topless in Los Angeles for a couple of months. "It's not a very easy lifestyle," she said. "It's pretty pathetic." Not long after leaving strip clubs for good, Poe said, she checked into a drug rehabilitation clinic to overcome a methamphetamine addiction. She said she's clean and working as an assistant buyer for a tire importing company in Houston. "I went through a really rough time whenever I stopped competing. There was definitely some drugs involved," Poe said. "But without that time, I wouldn't be where I am now. I love my life now." Poe, who lived at the OTC when she was 15 and traveled overseas with USA Taekwondo teams, said she didn't blame USA Taekwondo for her choice of a path that began with underage drinking and casual sex with teammates. "I'm sure there was inappropriate stuff that happened," Poe said. "I have to take responsibility for that most of the time. I was drunk and not doing what I should have been doing. "There were times when it was certainly not something I wanted to do. But I was there. I did it. I got drunk, and I was hanging around with the wrong people." Kim tore the anterior cruciate ligament in one knee at the 2001 national team trials at the OTC and stopped competing soon after. Now 27, Kim moved to Dallas, where she said she worked at several restaurants and a Starbucks coffee shop. She declined to discuss her job as a waitress at The Men's Club, a strip club in Dallas. --__--__-- Message: 4 From: "Thomas Gordon" To: Subject: RE: [The_Dojang] Interesting Link Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 19:41:23 -0500 Reply-To: the_dojang@martialartsresource.net "I did not write the piece in question. It was written by Phil Elmore. That darn troublemaker Thomas Gordon stated that it was like something that I would write, so I think that's where the confusion is coming from." LOL! Sorry for the confusion...and to be the trouble maker! I had no idea who Phil Elmore was so I checked it out. His website is www.themartialist.com Comparing the writings, Craig Stoval could/should be rich if Elmore can make a living being a "writer for hire." Thomas Gordon Florida --__--__-- _______________________________________________ The_Dojang mailing list The_Dojang@martialartsresource.net http://martialartsresource.net/mailman/listinfo/the_dojang Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://the-dojang.net Old digest issues @ ftp://ftp.martialartsresource.com/pub/the_dojang Copyright 1994-2007: Ray Terry and http://MartialArtsResource.com Standard disclaimers apply. Remember September 11. End of The_Dojang Digest