Rodrigo Villanueva will compete in the next ITF World Championships as a representative of Peru, as he has been doing since 2019. Under the careful instruction of Oscar Rodríguez, 3 Dan, he has prepared for this World Cup with training sessions of up to 3 and 4 shifts a day, and in the final stretch without rest days, directly from Monday to Monday.
As we have already seen in other World Cup interviews, his entry into Taekwon-do is motivated by a need for changes in his personal life. “When I moved to Argentina, I suffered a lot from bullying, when I left school they beat me, they made fun of me, a lot of discrimination, like now with social networks but before it was there, person to person. One day I decided to get into martial arts that always caught my attention… it was when I was 13”.
“I was a self-conscious person to speak in public, very nervous, very insecure and with Taekwon-do I began to change all that. Little by little I discovered another reality and I began to have that confidence in myself… it was a radical change in my life”.
For this World Cup, Rodrigo Villanueva fully prepared himself. In addition to the 4 shifts with his instructor, he also incorporated a sports psychologist to improve concentration and ward off nerves or anxieties, a physical trainer and a nutritionist to have a diet according to the upcoming competition.
“The truth is that my life changed a lot in this year prior to the World Cup… with my same discipline, my same focus, sacrificing time from my daily life such as reducing work hours, to spend more time training and be able to fulfill my routines”
That focus and concentration of which the representative of Peru for the World Cup in the Netherlands speaks, is expressed in a more forceful way in the moments before entering the competition. “On the trip to the place of the competition I listen to music and think about how I can “work” with the person I will have to face. We already have the strategy but with the music I am thinking about how I am solving it, I am seeing all those images in my mind. Minutes before the competition I just get very motivated, convince myself of what I’m going to do until the moment the competition starts when the focus is fully there.”
Rodrigo Villanueva adjusts the last details of his preparation to represent Peru in Forms, Combat and Ability Break, “what I stand out the most is in Combat but I worked very well in the three specialties.”
As a closing, he tells us about his expectations for the ITF World Championships that begins in 10 days. “This World Cup is going to be a nice experience but I’m not going just for the experience, I’m going to be world champion. I have a clear objective, it is to go and be world champion. The work has already been done before, I’ll go alone to look for the podium that corresponds to me”.