Rule-Making at the Junior Pan American Games: How unchecked power gutted trust in Pan-American Poomsae

What MASTKD warned yesterday has now played out on the mat. At Asunción 2025, Dennis Berdugo, the Director of Sport for the Pan American Taekwondo Union (PATU), amassed extraordinary control over how Poomsae would be run—and, according to coaches, team officials, and event documents reviewed by MASTKD, used that discretion to shape the competition in ways that directly advantaged his own family, with his wife on the chair and two children on the start list.