JAMAICA'S PROGRESS at the World Cup of Tae Kwon Do in Benidorm, Spain, was halted by injuries on Sunday, but not before the five-man senior team registered a stunning upset over Poland, ending the Europeans' eight-year dominance in team fighting.

It was a shocking victory by Jamaica, who rewrote the history books by stopping the unbeaten Poles 3-0 at the tournament attended by 38 countries, fielding more than 800 athletes, making it the biggest International Tae Kwon Do Federation (ITF) World Cup staged in recent times.

Jamaica's squad, led by captain Jason McKay and comprising Arthur Barrows, Kenneth Edwards, Nicholas Dussard and Dwayne Brown, first went up against Japan, which the Combined Martial Arts Team recently beat at the Tri-Asian Championship.

The Japanese were again beaten 3-0 by Jamaica, who sent Barrows, Edwards and Dussard to the mat.

The second-round draw pitted Jamaica against Poland, opponents who had defeated them in the semi-finals of the 2004 World Cup in Orlando, Florida.

Silenced arena

However, a confident Jamaica squad took the mat and silenced the arena as Barrows, Edwards and Dussard sent the Poles packing.

The match was not without casualty as all three Jamaicans received serious injuries in their respective bouts, resulting in captain McKay forced to call on travelling umpire, Trevor Webb, to join the squad so the team could continue in the rounds.

Webb, a former member of the national Tae Kwon Do team to the 2001 World Championship in Italy, was up to the task and bravely fought his Canadian opponent, who was 20 years his junior.

However, injuries sustained in the Polish match-up forced the squad to withdraw from further competition.

The Poles, along with North Korea, have long been targets of McKay in the Combined Team's quest to become the world's number one team fighting unit.

However, he said it is now pointless to travel to Poland.

"Five members of the national Tae Kwon Do starting line-up are all Combined Team members and it would make no sense fighting them again as there's no marketing gain," said the team captain.

"Technically, they have been defeated by the same squad with which we were planning to battle them," he pointed out

McKay said the Combined Martial Arts Team would now turn its attention to North Korea and China.

Other outstanding performances at the tournament came from new black belt sensation, Alrick Wanliss, who won a bronze medal in male individual black belt microweight as well as female junior fighter Tashana Grannum.

Wanliss was attending his first ever world tournament and showed he will be a force to reckon with in the future.

Grannum was the flagbearer for the junior squad at her first ever world tournament, taking bronze in heavyweight sparring red belt division.

Her third-place effort was Jamaica's second individual female bronze medal in world Tae Kwon Do and the first won by a junior.