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Rio Olympics: Team GB’s Jade Jones Wins Taekwondo Gold Medal

Alt="Jade Jones with her Gold Medal"

Great Britain’s Jade Jones claimed the gold medal beating Spain’s Eva Calvo Gomez 16-7 in the final.

The Team GB athlete also won Great Britain’s first Olympic Gold Medal in Taekwondo at the London 2012 Olympics.

Jade Jones’ journey into the final was one of dominance and ease. In the first round, she beat Morocco’s Naima Bakkal 12-4 before overcoming Belgium’s Raheleh Asemani 7-2 in the quarter-final.

The semi-final against Sweden’s Nikita Glasnovic proved to be the Welsh athlete’s toughest test of the competition. The swede managed to land a head kick to put pressure on Jones with the score at 4-3. Being the reigning Olympic Champion and world champion, she managed to compose herself well.

In the final, Jones connected with two head kicks to seal victory and win the gold medal to go with the one she won at London Olympics.

“I’m still young so to be double Olympic champion already is crazy to be honest,” Jones told BBC Sport.

The Team GB athlete was in a different position to the one she was in four years ago being unknown and unseeded in 2012. This time around, she was the number one seed and the defending Olympic Champion, which she said added a great deal of pressure.

The 23-year-old Jones said: “I started crying before the semi-final because I was just so nervous and felt so much pressure. But I pulled it off when it mattered so I’m just so happy.

“I obviously knew I’d feel some pressure as the reigning Olympic champion but I didn’t realise how much it would be.”

Since taking up Taekwondo, Jade Jones has ben hugely successful. She won gold at the 2010 Singapore Youth Olympic Games before winning silver a year later at the World Championships.

At the European Championships in Baku (2014), Jones won a silver medal again before ultimately going one better and winning gold at Montreux in 2016.

Jade Jones

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