Sarah Stevenson
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SARAH STEVENSON walks into the sports bar at the Doncaster Dome where, sitting by the door, Ronald Brown, chairman of this modern, edge-of-town leisure centre, is about to eat lunch. The walls are busily decorated with sporting memorabilia. "We've left a space there for your photo and medal," Brown bellows, as he sees her coming. She acknowledges politely, sits in a corner, but looks worried. Her coach is late, which is most unlike him. "Something
serious must have happened," she says.
Brown explains his greeting. "She has a chance of a gold medal and we are all excited," he says. Doncaster, accustomed to the national successes of its Belles women's football team, is now learning to appreciate the footwork of the local 17-year-old sensation in the Korean martial art of taekwondo.
Her father, Roy, as he has done for many years, still has to do car boot sales and raffles to help to fund her training, but it will all be worthwhile if Stevenson, the only woman selected for the Great Britain team, puts Doncaster on the map at the Olympic Games in Sydney in September.
World junior champion at 15, European junior champion and senior world quarter-finalist at 16, Stevenson has grown up fast in a sport she took up at seven because she felt left out when her brother went off to do it. At 11, she was runner-up in a tournament for 14-year-olds and upwards in Sindelfingen, Germany, and, at 16, was pitched in with the senior heavyweights at the Barcelona Open, emerging as the winner. Never mind that she was a junior 67kg fighter. She trains mainly with men, kicks
like a mule, and confesses to frightening off boyfriends.
Gary Sykes, Stevenson's coach, finally arrives and explains that workmen had turned up at his house unexpectedly. He confirms the Dome chairman's expectations. "With a good draw, she can medal," he says. Only the Korean three-times world champion seems a formidable obstruction blocking her path to gold. Stevenson says: "At the moment I don't think I could beat her but, when I get to the Olympics, I will be
mentally stronger, physically fitter, and then I think I will be able to beat her."
Sykes thinks his pupil could defeat the Korean now and people have learnt to respect his judgment. It was his decision to pitch her into a tournament for 14-year-olds at 11, his strategy to throw her in with the heavyweights. Of Sindelfingen, he said: "If she had got beaten, people would have thought my judgment wasn't right, but I knew she was good enough and I wanted to develop the confidence in her." Of Barcelona, he said: "I took a lot of stick but
she not only won but got best female fighter of the day." The Austrian Open in Vienna in May has been another of this season's successes.
Doncaster has become a taekwondo town, with Sykes estimating a population of almost 2,000 participants. "I started about 25 years ago when it was about keeping it to yourself," he says. "You didn't tell anybody you did a martial art, but I was going down the wrong road. I had got in with the wrong people and needed something to get me back on the straight and narrow. In Doncaster town centre one day, I saw a poster of this Korean martial artist.
"It said: 'Come and try it, give yourself discipline'. I liked what I saw. My parents said I wouldn't stick at it but I did and, in 1982, I went to the world championships. Representing my country as far away as Ecuador showed that I had achieved something worthwhile."
A demonstration sport twice at the Olympics, taekwondo has been granted full medal status for the first time in Sydney. Contests are staged over three three-minute rounds and points are scored by hitting targets on the body and head. Body protectors and head guards absorb the worst of the blows. Sykes encourages his charges to target the head.
Although only one point per hit is awarded, he says: "It influences the judges because it is harder to hit the head than the body. It's a superior hit, plus you have the chance of knocking them out."
Stevenson admits to having disliked taekwondo at first "because the nasty man was shouting at me". She stopped but started again six months later, although she cannot recall why. Roy Stevenson must have wished at times that she had never gone back because life for him, beyond his factory job as a rope capper, has been one long round of fund-raising activities on behalf of his daughter for the past six years.
He squeezes a few pounds here and there out of local businesses, gets shops to stump up raffle prizes, is forever knocking on neighbours' doors selling draw tickets and has even staged a gala day complete with bouncy castle and taekwondo demonstration to send Sarah to an international tournament. "We had posters up around where I live and raised about £400," Sarah says. "It was a good day." An average fundraising day
realises £50 to £60 from a car boot sale.
The Stevenson home "is falling to bits", according to Dad. "Life has been a struggle financially but none of it has been a burden," he says. "I feel sometimes I am being a nuisance knocking on people's doors but they are very helpful and, as long as Sarah is competing and needs the money, I will keep doing it." Sarah receives no National Lottery sports funding but has been helped by the British Olympic Association.
An Olympic medal, though, would presumably mean an end to the car boot sales. "I don't know," Roy says. "But it would be nice to have a rest." Who would have thought it? From car boots to an Olympic medal. Doncaster expects.
DAVID POWELL
The Times
