Kickboxing - History

After the Korean and Vietnamese wars the demand for eastern martial arts in the USA was big. Because the Americans could not identify with the traditional Asian norms they started organising tournaments with contact-fighting instead of without. The word Karate was still used although other style representants partcipated, too. Karate was used to summarize all punching and kicking martial arts.

In 1974 the first professional world championships in full contact were held in Long Beach, USA. The organiser, Mike Anderson, who was the initiator of the professional association PKA and later became the president of the amateur association WAKO, was the founder of kickboxing which was still called Point-, Sport-, All-style- or Contact-Karate at that time. This new style of Karate was made possible by the invention of the Korean Jhoon Rhee who lived in Washington. Advised by his friend Bruce Lee he developed a special safety set for hands and feet called Safe-T-Equipment.

Gym owner Georg F. Brückner from Berlin was the first German to organise meetings in Germany in this discipline. In 1977 he founded the World AII-Style Karate Organisation, called WAKO with other members of this new system. After a short time it became an organisation that was hosting championships all over the world so that Brückner was able to organise the first world championships in his home town in 1978 and the second followed in the USA in 1979.

The WAKO changed its name to WACO for "World AII-Style Combat-Sports Association". But it was not possible to register WACO in the USA so the name was changed back to WAKO again in April 1982. This time it stood for "World AII-Style Kickboxing Organisation". The new sport was now called kickboxing because this fitted better and because the new style did not have much in common with traditional karate any more. In 1985 the world organisation split after big opinion differences in leading groups. Suddenly there were two WAKOs and two world championships and two European championships.

The first WAKO kept ist old name "World AII-Style Kickboxing Organization" and was still lead by Mike Anderson and Georg F. Brückner. The second called itself "World Amateur Kickboxing Organization" and was lead by the Italian Dr. Ennio Falsoni. Because everybody was unsatisfied with this situation the organisations were reunified to make the biggest world organisation in the kickboxing scene in 1987 during the 10 year jubilee. In the same year the name WAKO was changed to "World Association of Kickboxing Organization" and is still the biggest kickboxing organisation in the world. Because of internal disputes lots of small kickboxing organisations have been founded, some only having few members but still being „world organisations“. This only irritates spectators and is negative for the scene and the athletes