Lee Kwan-Young

Lee Kwan-Young (Korean: 이관영) was born in Seoul on 19 April 1946, at a time when the southern half of Korea was under the United States Army Military Government. He said that his father, a doctor, was abducted by North Korean forces during the Korean War, and the French Taekwondo Federation's tribute recalls that he lost his father and then his mother and spent a turbulent childhood on the outskirts of the capital. A family tradition held that he descended from Admiral Yi Sun-sin, the 16th century hero of Korea's wars against Japan.

His energy was channelled into martial arts. Noticed by the masters of the Chung Do Kwan, the oldest of the pioneering Korean schools, he began training in tang soo do at the age of nine, although classes were then meant for adults. Under the founders Um Un-kyu, Lee Won-kook and Park Hae-man he became a black belt and a leading competitor in the first official competitions of what was becoming taekwondo.

Without the means to go to university, he joined the South Korean army. During the Vietnam War he served as an instructor to the special forces contingent of the South Korean 9th Infantry Division, and on his return to Korea he became an instructor to the United States 7th Infantry Division. This experience of real combat shaped his martial arts for the rest of his life.

In 1968, aged 22, Lee entered a selection contest organised under the responsibility of the South Korean state, which wanted to spread taekwondo to other countries. Candidates had to hold at least a fifth dan and were tested in sparring, breaking, throws, joint locks and weapons. He won ahead of 84 other contenders and was given the task of introducing taekwondo to France, where he arrived and began teaching in 1969. Among his early clubs was the Club athlétique d'Orsay, where he helped develop the discipline from 1970.

In 1973, when France took part in the world taekwondo championships for the first time, he was its coach, and he remained national coach until 1975. That year a demonstration brought him to the attention of Chinese film producers, and he spent several years in Hong Kong making films, meeting figures such as Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan. He returned to France in 1978 and taught in clubs in the Paris region. When taekwondo joined the French karate federation (FFKAMA) in 1979, he became its first technical director for taekwondo and brought five Korean sixth-dan masters to France to help him. Alongside other Korean experts he is regarded as one of the principal pioneers of both taekwondo and hapkido in France.

From the early 1980s he also worked discreetly as an instructor to the French police, including the RAID intervention unit, and as a close protection specialist, and he taught within the Police nationale through the 1990s. He was promoted to ninth dan by the Chung Do Kwan in 1988 and by the Kukkiwon, the world taekwondo headquarters, in 2001.

In 1996 he founded hoshin moosool, a self-defence and combat method based on hapkido and taekwondo and on his experience as a military and police instructor, combining strikes, kicks, locks, throws and the handling of traditional weapons. He insisted on the traditional and martial side of the arts over competition, and taught for decades at the Académie Lee Kwan-Young in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, as well as at courses across France and abroad. Karaté Bushido magazine, which put him on its cover in 1990, credited him with training more than 1,500 black belts.

His screen appearances included Palamun (1976), The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), Tout feu, tout flamme (1982) and La Baston (1985), and the television series Navarro and Largo Winch.

Lee kept his private life largely out of public view. He said that he always felt indebted to France, the country he had chosen, and he spent most of his adult life there before returning to Seoul in his late seventies. In the year he turned 78 he opened a new dojang in a quiet district of Seoul, named in French the Académie Lee Kwan Young d'arts martiaux coréens and decorated with the Eiffel Tower and Marianne; he liked to take a small black coffee on the terrace of the café below, as he had in Montreuil.

Away from martial arts he was a keen pétanque player and founded the first pétanque federation in Korea, which the federation's tribute suggested may have been the achievement he was proudest of.

In June 2025 Karaté Bushido reported that Lee, then 79, was being treated for cancer, and his students and the wider martial arts community launched a fundraising appeal to support his treatment. He continued to teach and advise when his health allowed.

Lee Kwan-Young died in Seoul on 18 October 2026, aged 80. The French Taekwondo and Associated Disciplines Federation (FFTDA) announced his death on 19 October with a tribute written by Emmanuel Charlot, describing him as the pioneer of the discipline in France to whom generations of practitioners, teachers and champions owed their discovery of taekwondo. Its president, Hassane Sadok, said that French taekwondo had lost its founding father and sent the condolences of the federation and the whole taekwondo family to his relatives and students. Funeral arrangements had not been made public.

Lee is remembered as the man who introduced taekwondo to France and laid the foundations on which the sport grew into an Olympic discipline with French world and Olympic medallists. Through his own students and the Korean masters he brought to France, his influence runs through French taekwondo and hapkido, and his hoshin moosool continues to be taught in clubs that bear his name.

France honoured him in his lifetime: La Poste issued a stamp with his portrait in 2019 to mark 50 years of taekwondo in France, and by decree of 23 November 2022 he was made a knight of the Ordre national du Mérite. A few years before his death he summed up his sense of mission by saying that if a single student needed him a thousand kilometres away, he would go.