TOKYO — In the sand-swept alleys of Niamey, the capital of one of the world’s poorest nations, Niger, they spin kick. In the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, crowded with Syrians who fled civil war, they scissor kick. And in the slums of Thailand, where martial arts offer a tantalizing path out of poverty, they deliver the chopping ax kick that helps make taekwondo the most explosive of the combat sports.

Of all the Olympic events, taekwondo is perhaps the most generous to the wealth of nations that exist on the margins of international sport. Since the Korean martial art became an Olympic medaling sport in 2000, it has managed to deliver more than a dozen medals to countries that have relatively few athletes at the Olympics and, until recently, even fewer hopes of triumphing in anything at all.

Ivory Coast and Jordan won their first-ever Olympic golds in taekwondo, as did Taiwan. Niger, Vietnam and Gabon scored their first silvers. Afghanistan’s only Olympic medals, a pair of bronzes, came from it, too.

In Tokyo, athletes from 61 nations, plus three members of the Refugee Olympic Team, are competing in taekwondo, remarkable diversity for a sport that had been contested in only five Games. More than a dozen flag-bearers for Olympic teams in Tokyo are taekwondo fighters, underscoring the sport’s significance to smaller sporting nations.

Taekwondo may not enjoy the high profile or mass viewership of sports like gymnastics or boxing. But the self-defense discipline is practiced by tens of millions of people, particularly in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Its popularity rests, in part, on the

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