In the Taekwondo event of the Olympic Games held in Tokyo, Japan this year, Lo Chia-ling, only 19 years old, won a bronze medal. She was the youngest and tallest female Taekwondo athlete from Taiwan since our nation began competing in the Olympic Taekwondo event back in 1988.

Lo Chia-ling’s father, Lo Wenhsiang, helps Lo improve her kicking techniques as they train in attack and defense skills to fit all angles and strategies.

Dreams woven from sweat and tears

Lo Chia-ling’s father and first coach, Lo Wenhsiang, who is 190 centimeters tall, was able to become a national-­level Taekwondo competitor thanks to his long limbs and his tenacious personality. While he was on the national team, Wenhsiang got to know Liu Tsung Ta, another team member, and Liu later became the coach who trained Lo Chia-ling all the way into the ­Tokyo Olympics.

Lo Wenhsiang points to a wooden plaque in his dojang inscribed “Uphold Martial Virtues.” This was a gift given to him by Colonel Hou Weixing, who was his first coach in the military and who served as head coach of the national Taekwondo team from 1988 to 2008.

“Many parents send their kids here not only to improve their physical conditioning, but even more to train their character through the spirit of Taekwondo and help them learn how to get along in a group setting.” Lo Wenhsiang is a very strict instructor, and has for ­decades been teaching based on the unchanging principles of respect for the teacher, the importance of the “Way,” hard work, fortitude, and friendship among peers.

From national team member to coach, Lo has trained group after group of highly skilled Taekwondo athletes. “For each athlete trained to competition level, you lose 30 students.” Lo’s comment describes the costs and effort invested in each other by coaches, athletes, and parents. Liu Tsung Ta, who is a physical education teacher at Tou­qian Junior High School in New Taipei City’s Xin­zhuang District and is in charge of Taekwondo classes at San-Min High School in neighboring Lu­zhou District, talks about how Taekwondo changed his life, and also enabled him to figure out how to help students in difficult situations to adjust their mindsets and their attitude to learning.

In the Lo family dojang, Chia-ling and her elder brother Lo Yu Cheng are both ordinary students and don’t get any special treatment. But when they get back home, “Dad really loves us so much, so I can get away with playing up to him like a little girl.” Chia-ling, who spent her early childhood rolling around in the dojang, recalls how as a child she watched her father direct­ing the students’ actions. “I thought the kicks were espe­cially cool and powerful, and I decided to study ­Taekwondo.”

Talking about her reasons for taking up the sport, Lo Chia-ling doesn’t mention any grand ideas like her father filling her with a sense of mission or anything like that. “My father gave us a great deal of freedom to be ourselves. It was my brother and I who decided to learn, and our father only began teaching us after repeatedly making sure it was what we wanted.” She adds: “Before we started, he said he was going to be very strict, and that once we got to the dojang he was no longer our ­father, but Coach Lo.”

Everyone in the Lo family is a black belt in Taekwondo, and with their heartfelt attachment to each other as well as their understanding of the sport, they are Lo Chia-ling’s most reliable support system. From left: Lo’s father, Lo Wenhsiang; Lo Chia-ling; and Lo’s mother, Ho Chien-chin.

One step at a time

When not wearing her dobok (Taekwondo uniform), Lo looks like an ordinary 19-year-old university student. As a middle-school student, she missed her class’s gradu­ation trip because she was competing overseas, so her classmates made a life-size photo cutout of her to take along with them so that she could stay “in the frame” in videos and photos. But Lo was already 180 centimeters tall even then, so they only made the portrait from the waist up. “I’ve always held on to that cutout, and each time I see it I think about how sweet their gesture was, but also I feel terrified,” she says, unable to keep from laughing out loud.

“Some people are envious that I’ve been able to visit so many countries, but in fact I’ve never had a chance to travel or have fun in a competition host country. There is only training, sparring, and competing.” Lo won a series of medals when she was still quite young, and became a member of the national team, but behind the burden of medal expectations was a girl who had missed out on many important moments in life. “I feel regret because after all, many things only come around once in life—but I made my choice.”

Thanks to her father’s training Lo learned how to “compartmentalize,” and through Taekwondo training cultivated her indomitable personality. “The reason I can be so ‘self-contained’ when it comes to training and com­peti­tions is that I can rely on the strength of my family.”

Lo is the first woman in the history of Taekwondo in Taiwan to win consecutive titles at two World Taekwondo Junior Championships. At age 17, in order to train for the Asian Games, she formally joined the adult category and entered the National Sports Training Center (NSTC) in Zuoying, Kaohsiung City. Faced with the markedly higher capabilities of people training with the national team, who except for her were all highly skilled university students in their 20s with abundant com­peti­tion experience, her outcomes declined dramatic­ally. Lo, who had often been the champion in junior Taekwondo events, admits that it was difficult for her, then still in high school, to stop worrying about wins and losses. Tormented and bewildered, she often cried and genuinely thought about quitting.

“That was the biggest hurdle I’ve ever encountered, and I was really uncertain about whether to leave or stay. My parents said, ‘Never mind, just come home, that’s OK.’” Her family’s unconditional acceptance gave Lo the strength to keep training. After Lo Wenhsiang asked Coach Liu Tsung Ta for help, Liu went to the NSTC and took on the task of helping Chia-ling get through her difficulties. Later, as Lo trained for the Tokyo Olympics, Liu brought his whole family south to Zuoying.

The Sports Development Promotion Foundation recorded the following data on the training that Lo ­undertook for the Tokyo Games: 700 kilometers of running, 1000 hours of weight control, 10,000 kick repetitions, particip­ation in more than 50 formal competitions and more than 250 bouts, 1820 hours of competition time. Amid such hard training, and given her extremely high demands on herself, Lo says, “In the process of constantly failing and getting up to try again, I gradually learned to stop worrying about winning or losing. I simply thought, ‘I will make a few adjustments and be better next time.’” Lo’s optimistic and straightforward person­ality became her greatest strength in overcoming the pressure that athletes put on themselves and that so many of them cannot transcend.

Time, limits to natural talent, and bad luck are the natural enemies of athletes. The solutions that enable them to pursue their careers are training, diligence, and self-adjustment.

Tokyo Olympics: Neither starting point nor endpoint

The Olympics are the most prestigious event for full-time athletes. “In fact, just qualifying for the Olympics was already the realization of my dream for the current phase of my career,” says Lo bashfully. “Probably no one thought that in a single day I would fight my way into the quarterfinals and then the semifinals, and win a bronze medal.”

Lo treated every appearance in Tokyo as a chance to practice against world-class athletes. She didn’t put herself under pressure to win a medal, and this enabled her to coolly seize every opportunity to score points and disrupt the rhythm of her opponents. After a defeat which left her just shy of the gold medal and a decisive victory that enabled her to win a bronze, Lo was able to walk away from the ring having matured a great deal.

Next up Lo faces countless domestic and international competitions, and in three years she will have the chance to compete in the Paris Olympics. Lo has taken her bronze from Tokyo and refound her original motivation: “I want to devote myself entirely to my career as a profes­sional Taekwondo athlete and not have any regrets.” Lo understands that the career of every profes­sional athlete is limited. She says with a mischievous smile: “When I’m forced to leave this occupation, I will choose a job that has absolutely nothing to do with Taekwondo!”

“Each time I feel tired and really want to give up, I try to push myself a little more. Looking back later, I discover that these obstacles that I thought I could never get past were the basis for the times when I achieved breakthroughs and made the fastest progress.” For Lo Chia-ling, Taekwondo has not only given her competition successes and countless medals to hang on her wall, even more importantly it has engraved a set of values of honor and righteousness in her mind, and brought out in her a determination that goes beyond victory or defeat.