Beyond the Tatami: in Bielsko-Biała, karate's other careers take the floor

On Thursday 15 October, the second day of the 2026 World Cadet, Junior & U21 Championships, the juniors will spend the morning on kata before a kumite session that runs into the evening. At 11:00 that day, at the Szyndzielnia Hotel in Bielsko-Biała, the WKF Women's Sport Commission will open a two-hour conference whose title states its subject plainly: "Beyond the Tatami: Women Shaping the Future of Karate". The WKF describes it as a gathering of women from different areas of the karate community, meant to share experiences, discuss professional pathways and examine how women can contribute to the development of the sport "both on and beyond the tatami".

A conference inside a championship

The setting gives the question its weight. The conference is part of the official programme of championships that run from 14 to 18 October and, in the WKF's words, bring together athletes, coaches, officials and members of the international karate community. When the provisional entry tables were consulted on 2 October, as our preview of the championships reported, they listed 899 women's entries out of 1,997, from cadets aged 14 and 15 to Under-21 athletes. The conference is concerned with the roles that surround competition and outlast it: the referee's position on the tatami, the committee room, the federation office, the experience a former competitor carries into the next stage of her life in the sport.

Four paths, one panel

According to the WKF, the four speakers will share perspectives from different areas of karate and offer insights into their professional journeys and the opportunities open to women within the sport. The Commission's chair, Sarah Wennerström of Sweden, a member of the WKF Executive Committee, has followed several of those paths herself. Her WKF profile records that she began karate in 2000, in the Shito-ryu style, competed nationally from 2002 to 2008 and has held a national referee licence since 2009; she has been Secretary General of the Swedish Karate Federation since 2013, joined the European Karate Federation's Executive Committee in 2021 and the WKF's in 2022.

Ma Junting of China brings the referee's view. She sits on the WKF Referee Commission, where her listed responsibility is the Female Referees Group, and is also a member of the Women's Sport Commission. Shanghai's Laodong Bao has recorded that she moved from competition to refereeing in 2006, reached the highest WKF refereeing grade in 2019 and, at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, was one of four women among the sixteen karate referees, officiating the women's kata final that produced the first Olympic gold medal in the sport's history and announcing its result. In a 2024 interview with the same newspaper, she recalled losing her grade after two years away from international events during pregnancy, and said she had argued for a protection period for women referees in that situation, as well as for more women to officiate men's heavyweight bouts.

Veronika Mišková of the Czech Republic, whom the WKF presents as a two-time continental championships medallist, speaks from the competitor's side: Czech media recorded her bronze medals in individual kata at the European Championships in Istanbul in 2015 and in Poreč in 2021. Alessia Coppola, from Italy, completes the panel.

The discussion will be moderated by Antonella Nanni, the WKF's Legacy Programme Director and a member of the Commission, who represented the federation at the end of September at the Global Observatory for Gender Equality & Sport conference in Lausanne.

Under the eyes of the next generation

The WKF places the conference within its ongoing work to provide opportunities for women across the karate community and to encourage greater participation in the different areas of the sport. Those wishing to attend can register through a form linked from the WKF announcement.

The championships themselves will be watched far beyond Poland, since the WKF will stream them live and in full on its YouTube channel for the first time, from the eliminations to the medal bouts, as we reported earlier this month. The conference addresses a quieter part of the same week. Among the girls bowing onto the tatami in Bielsko-Biała, some may one day hold the referee's whistle, sit on a commission or run a national federation, and the panel gathered at the Szyndzielnia Hotel sets out to describe those routes while the next generation is in town.