Taipei, Nov. 23 (CNA) Taiwan government is still weighing its legal options against Asian and world taekwondo authorities which disqualified a Taiwanese athlete in the 2010 Guangzhou Asiad, a sports official said Tuesday in a press conference.
Taiwan has launched an appeal of the controversial disqualification of Yang Shu-chun within the Olympic Family and has been contemplating to file a lawsuit against taekwondo officials in a Guangzhou court, said Steven S.K. Chen, deputy mister of the Sports Affairs Council (SAC).
One week after Yang's controversial disqualification, Chen addressed the reporters after the third meeting of an inter-agency task force, which Taiwan government has set up to appeal the case.
However, there was no concrete decision made Tuesday, when Yang and her coach Liu Tsung-ta returned from China and attended the meeting for the first time.
Yang was disqualified during her first-round bout in the women's taekwondo under 49-kilogram weight division on Nov. 17 after she scored a 9-0 lead over her Vietnamese opponent.
According to World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) Secretary-General Yang Jin-suk, who did not have any role in the actual decision but served as the main spokesman for the taekwondo world in the incident's aftermath, said Yang was disqualified for wearing extra sensors on her socks in an attempt to score more points, which was an act of cheating.
While video footage showed the sensors were removed before Yang began the contest, a statement posted on the Asian Taekwondo Union's (ATU's) website described the incident as a "shocking act of deception of Chinese Taipei."
The incident, which has ignited public outrage and an anti-Korea sentiment in Taiwan and has received coverage from international media, was so high-profile that Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou and Premier Wu Den-yih had personally addressed the incident as "unfair" and had described it as damaging Taiwan's national pride.
A task force, headed by Vice Premier Sean Chen, was established with officials from the SAC, the Executive Yuan, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice as well as Sung Yao-ming, a lawyer with Lee and Li, the law firm appointed by the government to handle legal matters.
Members of the task force, along with Yang and Liu, reviewed the video footage and every details of the Nov. 17 bout again in the two-hour meeting Tuesday to collect information which can be used as evidence in future lawsuits, Chen said.
Although Sung had said earlier that suing Yang Jin-suk in Guangzhou would be a better option than taking the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), an independent organization handling sports-related arbitrations, the task force could not decide who the plaintiff and the accused would be and when to file the lawsuit, according to Chen.
The task force was unsure whether a Guangzhou court has the jurisdiction over the case, Chen said, which was why it could not determine whether and when to take the case to court.
However, the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee (CTOC) has lodged an official protest against the ATU and the WTF with the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and has requested the OCA review the disqualification and mishandling of the two organizations, Chen said.
If the CTOC finds the results unacceptable, he said, it would then bring the case to the CAS. (By Chris Wang) enditem/S. C. Chang