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Jade Jones came to the Olympics talking about becoming a “legend” by winning a third consecutive gold medal in taekwondo. In case her quest for the ultimate ended in six minutes as IOC Refugee Team Kimia Alizadeh fought a brilliant fight to knock Jones out of the gold medal race at the earliest opportunity and leave the distraught British coaching staff in their arena seats.
The defeat in Makuhari Messe Hall is a blow to Team GB’s gold medal hopes, and another sign that Tokyo 2020 could be a truly bumpy landing after the choppy triumphalism of the past two Games. But remove the Union Flag filter and the real story is Alizadeh, whose defeat of the Olympic champion is a rare Olympic moment in itself.
Rewind two hours and Alizadeh had stepped out to the sound of AC / DC’s Thunderstruck for a preliminary fight against Nahid Kiani of Iran – the nation Alizadeh renounced last year.
Alizadeh grew up in Karaj, a town near Tehran, where his father made tablecloths for a living. She started Taekwondo at the age of seven in the local gymnasium. Eleven years later, she became Iran’s first female Olympic medalist at the Rio Games and returned, at the age of 18, to a grand state-sponsored welcome, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, congratulating publicly “the brave lady who shone with a full hijab on her forehead”. .
Fast forward three and a half years to January 2020 and Alizadeh issued a fierce and fearless statement in which she denounced the compulsory wearing of the hijab, spoke out against institutional corruption and deinstitutionalized sexism and described herself as “l one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years.
Alizadeh applied for refugee status in Germany. As recently as June, she was invited to the IOC Refugee Team, which was first featured in 2016. This time around, the IOC team includes 29 displaced athletes ”nine from Syria , four from South Sudan and one, Cyrille Tchatchet, from Cameroon, who is now studying for a mental health nursing degree at Middlesex University.
It was an irresistible narrative twist that the first fight on Sunday’s schedule is expected to pit Alizadeh against her friend and former national teammate, now Iran’s No.1 prospect in their shared weight class. The fight provided the most cinematic results as Alizadeh, a class above, dominated his former compatriot.
The most emotional moment came during the final siren when Alizadeh’s first act was to walk through and hug Kiani’s trainer. This left Alizadeh with a quick turnaround for the last 16 meetings with Jones, when the spectator room was buzzing, relatively speaking, with the media, officials and squad members.
Jones, aka “the Headhunter” is a true star of the sport, with a glimmer of event glamor about him even in the ring walking and pre-fight stretching. At the start, she threw in some signature bravery header to go up 6-2. But Alizadeh, a tall, angular and elegant fighter, fought on a clever tactical plan, using her greater reach and fighting with the back foot.
Taekwondo is loosely translated from Korean as “the art of kicking,” a 20th century codification of various traditional Korean martial arts. Other combat sports are more brutally effective – taekwondo, with its brittle, sideways stance, doesn’t have much weight in MMA bouts – but it does make it an ideal, clean and crisp Olympic three-round game.
The goal is basically to kick your opponent in the head, ideally with a three-point spinning motion. It’s Jones’ great skill, but Alizadeh kept it at bay, fluently scoring right up to the trunk. There was an agonizing delay at 14-10 as a potential offense was verified with the passage of time and Jones already looked extremely frustrated with the impending defeat.
Alizadeh closed his quarterfinal against China’s Lijum Zhou with a sublime spinning header in the final round to win 9-8. She collapsed, exhausted, on her back at the end. The semi-final against Tatiana Minina, another independent – this time under the Russian flag – was a step too far.
Alizadeh again dominated his opponent. But Minina, the 5e seed, was fast enough to rush into that long reach and back down just as quickly. A 10-3 loss left Alizadeh with a bronze medal match to play and the chance to win the first medal for the Refugee team, which would represent an important moment in Olympic history.
For Jones, the failure to come close to gold will be a blow after five years of waiting to defend his consecutive title. His career remains intact – an emblem of Britain’s “medal machine” years and a distinguished presence in sport on a global scale. Jones has already spoken about the competition in 2024, when she turns 31. Here, however, she was a supporting role in someone else’s story.
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