Kick, Punch and Then Some More Experienced Muay Thai practitioners will normally take a couple of rounds to assess their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses before launching an all out attack in rounds three and four. If a fighter already has an unassailable lead on the scorecards in round five, he will often go into defensive mode. Hence, if you see an action packed final round, it normally indicates that the fight is extremely close. A variety of techniques are allowed in Muay Thai but some of them score more heavily than others and are consequentially more popular. Straight knees, kicks to the body and throws or sweeps that put an opponent on the ground are all techniques, which impress the watching judges, who more often than not, decide the outcome of a bout. Although punching is an important aspect of Muay Thai, the emphasis is more on landing knees and kicks. A fighter who relies solely on his hands to do damage will struggle to win a decision. Elbows can be devastatingly effective and a short, sharp elbow
can render an opponent instantly unconscious, whereas a punch would need to travel a much greater distance to gain the necessary velocity. Muay Thai stadiums, along with horse racing tracks, are the only places in Thailand where gambling is legal. There are no official bookmakers, so people in the crowd will constantly be betting with one another using a complicated system of hand signals to indicate the odds, which fluctuates throughout the fight.
In For the Kicks At the start of the century there were only a handful of foreigners, or farangs as they are known in Thailand, competing in Muay Thai. Today, thousands of people travel to Thailand to train in the sport, ranging from beginners wanting to learn a new martial art to experienced world class fighters looking to fine tune their techniques. Many Muay Thai camps have stateof-the-art websites and the competition to entice tourist trade can be intense. In tourist hotspots such as Pattaya, Phuket and Koh Samui, no fight card is complete without a couple of foreigners on it. Teresa Wintermyr from Sweden left her friends and family three years ago and moved to Thailand in order to fulfil her dream of becoming a Muay Thai champion. “I read an article in a martial arts magazine about a Swedish girl who had trained at a Muay Thai camp and I wanted to try it. I travelled to Thailand to train at Rawai Muay Thai and I immediately fell in love with the sport, the lifestyle, the country, the people... everything.”
Hero Worship For Thai people Muay Thai offers a route out of poverty with children fighting at a very early age, often to help supplement their family income. In a country where a significant percentage of the population still
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