[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Dearest taekwondo family members, WTF

I am delighted and extremely proud to announce to you that the International Olympic Committee Executive Board (IOC EB) has decided that taekwondo will remain as a core sport of the 2020 Olympic Programme.

The announcement was made today at a press conference held by the IOC EB in Lausanne, Switzerland, at 12:00 p.m. local time. This recommendation for the Olympic Programme will be brought before the IOC Session in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in September 2013. While process is not complete, the global taekwondo family should be proud of what we have accomplished over the past four years and encouraged that we are continuing to move in the right direction with our sport. I want to thank each member of our family for the important role that you have played in this process.

Together, we ensured an incredibly successful London 2012 Olympic Games, but there is still so much more that we can do. From today, we must strive to make Rio 2016 an even greater milestone for taekwondo. This will not be an easy task, but we have already proven that we can achieve great things when we work together.

I have every confidence that the 2013 WTF World Taekwondo Championships in Puebla, Mexico, will be another crowning event for our sport. This will once again demonstrate how far we have come and the strength of our ambitions for the future. The 4th WTF World Para-Taekwondo Championships and the 2013 Swiss Open, which will take place in Lausanne on 8-9 June this year, are two more events that the WTF look forward to this year. Additionally, the Argentina Open will take place at the end of August this year. This will be the first time that an international taekwondo event has taken place in South America. I encourage all of you to participate in these wonderful events.

It is a tremendous privilege that I am able to deliver this wonderful news to you today.. Let us continue to work together to achieve and even more successful Olympic Games for taekwondo in 2016!

With happiness and gratitude,

Chungwon Choue
President