“Jack has a nation behind him” – Casserly

THE JOURNEY to becoming an Olympian is certainly not easy, and in an abstract sense at least, we, the general public, have always known that.

But last weekend, as two tremendous athletes for this country Jack Woolley and Emmet Brennan, broke down on camera in the wake of defeat in Tokyo, we really got it.

Thousands of hours subsumed in preparation, thousands of miles travelled in pursuit of that opportunity to bear the emblem of your nation, enduring pain and injury, not to mention the financial struggles that often accompany the pursuit of such a goal – all of that could be measured in the tears of those two competitors.

For Woolley, the first ever athlete to represent his country in Taekwondo on the Olympic stage, the road to Tokyo spanned more than five years since he was narrowly pipped for a berth in Rio in early 2016, but his dream of bringing home a medal from this summer’s Games took just four seconds to unravel.

The Tallaght man was unequivocal in the assessment of his performance in the Last 16 of the -58kg division against Lucas Guzmán, insisting it was well below par and, for some inexplicable reason, he lacked the aggression that has so often earned him gold in other top internationals.

But even given that, he was a point up as the third round neared its conclusion and so had the inside track to a place in the quarter finals.

That was until his Argentine opponent served up two late kicks to the trunk to clinch a dramatic 22-19 victory, leaving Woolley in desolation on the floor.

The South Dublin competitor had very little time to compute what had actually just happened before having to face the cameras and try and make sense of it for an Irish public that had been brimming with expectation ahead of his Olympic debut.

Woolley, who has captured gold at the US Open, the PanAm Championships, the Australian Open and many other elite level international contests in his sport, was understandably at a loss to explain, but in his attempt to grasp some rationale behind his defeat, he captured the hearts of the nation.

“I’m devastated. It’s tough to take and it will be” he told RTE.

“Some people have come here to participate in an Olympics. I came here to win it and I could have, but just not performing like that.

“I’m devastated with my performance. Everything was perfect, mentally great, physically great, I stepped on the mat and it just wasn’t my day.

“We had this game plan, but I went out and my legs just went to jelly. I’m usually a lot more aggressive, but something just didn’t click and I’m upset with how it went.”

“Woolley continued “I’m proud of myself to get here, but, as I said, I’m very disappointed and I feel like I let a lot of people down. They’ll always tell me I didn’t, just being nice.

“I just want to say sorry to a lot of people for my performance, but it’s not every day you get here, so hopefully everybody’s not too disappointed.”

Mark Casserly, who prior to Woolley emerging as Ireland’s top senior Taekwondo athlete, was himself the leading light for the nation in the sport, applauded the character of his fellow Tallaght man.

Tallaght’s Jack Woolley in action against Lucas Guzmán in the Last 16 of the Men’s -58kg Taekwondo event at the Tokyo Olympic Games

Indeed Casserly, who just missed out on a place in the 2004 Games in Athens after defeat at the hands of the then reigning Olympic champion in the third round of the qualifiers in Paris, could easily identify with the pain Woolley felt on Saturday morning.

“Jack has obviously gone further than me, but I too would have felt a level of carrying the sport to a certain degree in certain competitions” he told The Echo.

“You might keep that under control during most competitions, but it has to come out at some time.

“It’s a human game and I think that’s why the nation was drawn to Jack, because he has the emotion, he has the skill, he has everything.

“People were captivated by what he was saying. Like this is the Olympics and you want to see that raw emotion.

“And that’s the thing that draws people to him because it shows people that he’s a normal human being.

“Jack would get up every day and probably have a lot of metrics in training.

“So he knows he has to train twice that day, he knows he has to do X amount of kicks in a session, so you live a very strict metric-driven life and when something like this happens and you can’t figure it out and explain it there and then, that’s where you’re kind of lost in limbo.

“That’s where you need your family, your support-system and your coach, which he seems to have in abundance.  Jack has a lot of support and he has a nation behind him as well.

“It’s going to take a few weeks or a month or two to figure out exactly what happened, but he’ll come back strong” he said.