BEIJING, Aug 21: South Korea’s rising stars struck two taekwondo gold medals on Thursday as the martial art’s homeland joined the fray from the second day of the four-day competition.

Son Tae-Jin won the men’s

-68kg title by beating 2005 world champion Mark Lopez of the United States and birthday girl Lim Su-Jeong took the women’s -57kg crown when she whipped Turkey’s Azize Tanrikulu.

Mark’s featherweight silver added to his younger sister Diana’s bronze from the women’s featherweight contest as the trio of Lopez siblings lanched their medal hunt at the Beijing Olympic Games.

The eldest of the Lopez trio, four-time world champion Steven, fights for a third straight Olympic gold on Friday in the men’s -80kg welterweight division.

Son and Lim had won no major international title to their names but both finished top of the world qualifying tournaments for the Olympics last year.

Each nation can enter a maximum number of four fighters, two men and two women, to the Olympic taekwondo, a quota originally intended to stop South Korea from hogging medals.

Son, 65th at the world championships last year, led 2-0 in the first round but Lopez hit back in the second round with a side kick to the 20-year-old Korean.

They went into the final round level at 1-1 after Son was given a one-point penalty.

They exchanged effective kicks to put the score at 2-2 but Son’s kick caught the 26-year-old American three seconds before time.

The bronze medals went to Taiwan’s world champion Sung Yu-chi and European champion Servet Tazegul of Turkey.

In the women’s final, Lim, who celebrated her 22nd birthday on Wednesday, was deducted one point for a penalty in the opening round but hit back to win her first major international title.

Diana Lopez, the 2005 world champion, lost to Tanrikulu in the quarter-finals but fought back through the consolation repechage round of losers to win a bronze. The other bronze medal went to Croatia’s Martina Zubcic.—AFP