When some of the fighters he is likely to meet in the Beijing Olympics were
being blooded in their competitive taekwondo debuts, Aaron Cook was a
five-year-old fly-kicking his way around his living room in Dorset.
“I was mad about Power Rangers, so my parents started looking for a martial
arts class,” the 17-year-old said, laughing. “We lived in Dorchester - quite
a small town - and the only class we could find was taekwondo.”
If the Spandex-clad warriors who terrified a generation of parents seem a
remarkably recent memory, that is because Cook has arrived on the world
scene well ahead of schedule. “I should be fighting juniors,” he said. “But
I want to go to the Olympics.”
He is one of eight rising stars sponsored by Visa as prospects for the 2012
Olympic Games in London and in Istanbul, Turkey, last month he assured
Britain of a place in the Beijing Games by beating a Hungarian world bronze
medal-winner in the European qualifying event - four years ahead of the
timetable.
“Now I've got six months to win an Olympic gold medal,” Cook, who as the
British champion in the under-80kg category is all but assured of his place,
said after a supposedly light training session at British taekwondo's base
in Manchester.
While the speed of his ascent has taken the sport in this country by storm,
his ticket to Beijing will take him one step closer to fulfilling a dream he
has held for most of his life. His mother, Christine, still keeps a picture,
drawn by Aaron at school, of an Olympic gold medal.
Cook switched codes at the age of 10 to take up the World Taekwondo
Federation's full-contact version of the sport, leaving the International
Taekwondo Federation's semi-contact code, a version not recognised by the
International Olympic Committee.
“I started kicking people a bit too hard and getting disqualified, so I had a
conversation with my mum about taking-up full-contact,” he said. “I was the
best in the country in my age group at light contact, but I wanted to win an
Olympic gold and, although it wasn't an Olympic sport back then, I knew I
would have to take up the full-contact version.”
His parents were happy for him to take up the more physical variant, despite
the risks. “If you get hit you can get knocked out,” Aaron said, adding that
it has not happened to him - “touch wood” - but that it has happened to a
few of his opponents.
It was not the only time his parents made a difficult decision to support his
fledgeling career. Last year they moved from Dorchester to Manchester to be
nearer Aaron's training base. “It has been a huge sacrifice, leaving our
friends and jobs in Dorset, but I have to be honest, I would do it again,”
Christine said.
They also allowed Aaron to join the British taekwondo academy in Loughborough
at 15, before sitting his GCSEs. The academy then moved to Manchester.
Six days a week, 18 fighters train in the Feat Factory, hidden in a
dilapidated industrial estate opposite a patch of overgrown scrubland.
Sandwiched between a picture-frame factory and an electricity substation, it
seems an unlikely nerve centre for Britain's Olympic efforts.
A misdirected lorry driver who might venture through the door would find
himself faced with half a dozen pairs of white-suited sparring partners,
swapping kicks in rapid flurries or balletic, powerful arches (taekwondo
fighters cannot use their hands).
Beyond the taekwondo rings, at the back of the narrow hall, a few more figures
busy themselves in a torture chamber of gym equipment. A coach looks on
attentively while a technician films the action, which is streamed straight
to a laptop, to be pored over later. This is the elite end of British
taekwondo, but Cook is straining at the leash. “I've got to have everything
right on the day, nutritionally, mentally, physiologically,” he said. “It
needs to be 100 per cent.
“Only 16 fighters have qualified, so I can study who I'm up against. I know
who I have to beat.” It turns out he means this literally.
“I've got to beat Steve Lopez,” he said. “Two Olympic golds, four-times world
champion. He's one of the greats. If I want to win, I've got to beat him.”
In his bloody-minded determination to reach the summit of his sport, Cook
seems to have transferred the challenge into human form. The conversation
returns to Lopez periodically, as if the American embodies the Herculean
task in front of him.
Cook describes his daily routine of four intensive hours of practice each day.
“I think it isn't enough,” he said, clearly frustrated. “Steve Lopez is
training more than four hours a day. If I want to beat him, I need to train
more than him.”
His coach, Nelson Saenz-Miller, a huge Cuban, smiles patiently as he hears of
Cook's frustration. It is important to take a step down in intensity. “If he
wants to improve his performance he has to lose it a bit before he can build
it up again,” he said.
He describes Cook affectionately. “He is very friendly, very polite and very
honest and for a 17-year-old boy, there's an arrogance - it's normal in
fighters,” he said.
But if it is a gold medal Cook wants, he has two of the best advisers around
in Sir Steve Redgrave, the five-times Olympic champion, and Dame Tanni
Grey-Thompson, who won seven Paralympic gold medals, lead Visa's sponsorship
scheme.
“Steve Redgrave and Tanni Grey-Thompson have come to my house, watched me
train and said things that have helped me qualify for the Olympics,” Aaron
said. “They've helped me with things like getting nervous before a
competition - they have been through it before. Steve Redgrave was very
helpful in telling me about dealing with the expectations. I'm expected to
win now, which hasn't happened before.”
Cook inevitably returns to Lopez and his record two Olympic golds and four
World Championship victories. “I believe I can beat him,” he said firmly.
“And I believe I can beat his record as well.”
Fighting against evil
— Power Rangers is a long-running children’s TV series based around a group of
teenagers who “morph” into brightly coloured martial arts fighters to combat
evil.
— When under the cosh, they can merge to form a Megazord with
supernatural powers (a bit like Bolton Wanderers’ five-man midfield),
prompting the question of why they didn’t do so in the first place.
— The series began in 1993 and by the mid-1990s was being criticised in
Parliament for inciting the nation’s children to violence.
— The series occupied the minds of child psychologists, who produced
treatises such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Aesthetics of
Phallo-Militaristic Justice.
