The U.S. is hoping for a comeback in the sport of Taekwondo after failing to send any male athletes to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Now, America is back, and C.J. Nickolas is aiming to not just compete but become a gold medalist at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
And Nickolas gets it from his mama, who he started training with when he was three. “She was taking classes and she was better than me and she kept going up until two years ago — I had to make her stop,” Nickolas told Teen Vogue. “She was fighting 18-year-old girls and she’s 63. She got home with bruises and stuff. I was like, ‘shorty, you gotta chill.’”
“My mom was smart. She looked up combat sports for a kid and found martial arts that are in the Olympics, where you could build a career,” Nickolas stated. “And she found this random taekwondo school and put me in it.”
Compared to the athletes who recently qualified in gymnastics and track, Nickolas has been sitting on his news for the past six months. But he says, “what I’m really happy about is everybody else is happy for me, my family, seeing how excited they are that I’m going and all the hard work that my mom put in for me and everyone that’s poured into me, they’re just so happy for me and I’m glad that I can make them proud.”
“It was six Black women and me. They were the ones that were raising me, and having that at home and then being able to go to Taekwondo and get that other side of it gave me a great sense of self,” says Nickolas.
Along with the support of his family, this is the culmination of twenty years of work. Last year, he made headlines becoming the first American athlete since 2009 to medal at the world championships. Currently, the 23-year-old is the highest ranked American taekwondo athlete and is “second overall in the world for the 176-pound weight class. Additionally, Nickolas is the only American ranked in the top 20 in taekwondo.”
“He’s one of my hot picks to get the gold in welterweight, which is my old division,” said Lutalo Muhammad, a two-time British Olympic medalist. “America is back. They have a great team, they have a great coach … they’ve got young hungry athletes.”
The sport made its official debut at the Olympics in 2000. between August 7-10, 2024, viewers can follow along and watch Nickolas compete at the Grand Palais in the Paris Olympics taekwondo competition.
But, this year there are new rules. Instead of cumulative scoring, matches will be determined based on who wins the best-of-three, so athletes will now have to “win two of the three rounds to win the match.” According to The Associated Press, these “changes have been introduced to add more action and minimize wait-and-see strategies.”
