I do have a fair bit of experience with forms/kata competition, for what it’s worth. I realize other people will have different experiences, or different perceptions of those experiences, or may compete in tournaments that are run differently than those I competed in. So while I feel my opinion has worth in this case, it is not absolute.
When I was a teenage kenpo student in the mid 1980s I competed in two open tournaments with competitors from many systems, as a colored belt. I believe I placed third in both tournaments. We were the only kenpo school in the area, so my judges were from Tae Kwon do and karate backgrounds, as that was prevalent at that time, in that area. I don’t know what they thought of my forms, I never got a critique. However, my kenpo teacher also competed in my second tournament. In the middle of his form he had a brain-fart and flubbed the form. He managed to recover fairly well and completed the form. Afterward, he spoke with one of the judges who told him that he (the judge) liked the form and would have given the win to my teacher, except that when he saw my teacher roll his eyes he figured my teacher made a mistake in the form so he graded lower. That shows you how little the judges knew about the forms from our system.
Later, in the early 2000s as a Kung fu student I competed in a number of Chinese style tournaments, open to practitioners of all Chinese systems. Competition was segregated Traditional from Modern Wushu, and further deliberations for age, gender, level of experience, Northern or southern or internal style, sometimes animal style and “other” as a catch-all, long weapon, short weapon, double weapon, flexible weapon...there may have been others.
There were so many specialty divisions, sometimes there were vast parts of the tournament with no competitors.
At any rate, I was never terribly interested but my Sifu was one of the major promoters of one of the big tournaments so I competed to support him, often competing in several divisions at each tournament, always in the Traditional categories. I do not believe I ever competed without scoring a medal. Mostly gold, a few silver, and an occasional bronze. My groups often had a dozen or so competitors. I was also Grand Champion of my age group twice, which meant that I competed in a particular group of categories and scored the highest average.
To their credit, the tournaments always managed to get a solid lineup of judges, people who were well established and well respected Sifu in the Chinese martial arts community in the San Francisco area. So these were knowledgeable folks, although nobody can be knowledgeable about everything.
Over the years I scored maybe three dozen or more medals. I even went to China once to compete, and made fifth place out of 19 with my broadsword, which earned me a silver medal based on some bizarre algorithm. I would joke that I will make myself a shirt of maille by sewing my medals into the lining of my jacket.
Those medals sit in a box in my garage and never see the light of day, unless I happen to be cleaning out the garage and I uncover them. They sit there with my nunchaku and throwing stars and other fairly useless stuff that I ought to just get rid of.
Anyways, that is my history and that is what I base my opinion on. I am not a fan of kata competition. I feel it turns kata into performance art, which it was never meant to be. In my first two tournaments as a kenpo kid, we added extra kicks to make it more appealing to the Tae Kwon do judges. It is that desire to make the form more “performance worthy” that I feel lead to the development of XMA which is a martial-inspired performance art and I feel should be viewed as something different and not actually a martial art.
Anyway, that is where my experience is from and that is what I base my opinion on, for what it’s worth.
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