Yeon Hwan Park

Park Yeon Hwan
Born	1952 (age 64–65) South Korea
Style	Taekwondo
Rank	9th dan taekwondo

Korean name
Hangul	박연환
Revised Romanization	Bak Yeon-hwan
McCune–Reischauer	Pak Yŏnhwan

Yeon Hwan Park (born June 29, 1952) is a South Korean master of taekwondo. He currently has earned a ninth-degree black belt and holds the title kwan jang-nim (Grandmaster) under the direction of the Kukkiwon. Park was the undefeated Korean national champion of Tae Kwon Do from 1971 to 1975 and the former coach of the U.S. Olympic and Pan-American Tae Kwon Do team.

Park trained in his native Korea from early childhood. He attended Korea University and served in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps before being dispatched by the South Korean government as an emissary to Africa, where he began teaching taekwondo in Lesotho. In 1980 he settled in the United States, where he established himself as a prominent figure in taekwondo instruction. While worldwide study of the martial arts increased in popularity in the early 1970s, due in part to work of Bruce Lee, taekwondo was still largely unknown outside of Korea. In 1983 Park established the goal of increasing the popularity of the sport in a concerted movement towards having taekwondo become recognized as an official Olympic Sport. In response to the work of Park and other taekwondo leaders the International Olympic Committee granted the sport Demonstration Sport status in the 1988 and 1992 games and as a full medal sport, commencing with the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia.

He has also served as president of the New York State Tae Kwon Do Association and in 1993 he became the secretary-general of the United States Tae Kwon Do Union. He is the former vice president of the United States Tae Kwon Do Union and the publisher of USA Taekwondo Review. In 2013 he was elected to the presidency of the Korea Youth Promotion Association of the USA, a non-profit organization sponsoring student exchanges with the South Korea, Japan and The United States. Park has been an adjunct professor of Taekwondo at Long island University and at the University of Bridgeport, lecturer and has coauthored Black Belt Tae Kwon Do and Tae Kwon Do, Third Edition, both for Checkmark Books, as well as 12 other books on the martial art. His latest book, Tae Kwon Do, My Life and Philosophy was published in 2009.

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