McGowan hopes to deliver Olympic gold & change the face of taekwondo

McGowan admits she has always been up for a scrap, ever since asking fellow five-year-olds to wrestle her at the back of the classroom: “none of them wanted to join in. I’m not too sure why!”

Her parents saw the writing on the wall after she was signed up for Highland dancing a few months later. “I was never very graceful or any good,” she remembers. “To be honest, it wasn’t violent enough for me.”

McGowan has been steeped in this idiosyncratic martial art since the age of five, when she first set foot in Caledonian Taekwondo Club to teach Michael Devine a lesson.

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“I had a love/hate friendship when I was five or six years old with a boy who lived across the street from me,” McGowan said of Devine, with whom she is still in touch.

“One day we would be best friends, laughing and smiling and then the next day we would be beating lumps out of each other in the street. I found out that he did taekwondo, I thought he’d get an edge on me so I decided to do it and do it better than him.”

The self-portrait that McGowan paints is a force of nature - heard before she was seen and gregarious in a group setting. After two taekwondo sessions, her Dad quipped that he would go and put a bet that his daughter would win the Olympics. How he must have wished that he’d done so.

“I just had a natural click with it,” McGowan says. “Most kids try loads of different sports but I was only ever drawn to one. My initial motivation was to be better than my friends but I just fell in love with it, the fighting aspect and all of the different technical kicks. The self-defence aspect of it too.

“Taekwondo has always given me a lot of confidence,” she adds. “I got to meet a lot of people from around the world and going into adulthood, joining the GB team and going to university, it has helped me have the confidence to go up and talk to anyone. I think that comes from having so many different experiences at such a young age.”

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That self-belief fed twin towering ambitions: to become an Olympic champion or a brain surgeon.

“I like a bit of a challenge,” she understates. “If I’m going to do something, I want to be the best at it and do the best that I can do.”

McGowan’s parents diplomatically informed her that she couldn’t do both, enrolling her for GB Taekwondo’s Fighting Chance talent programme when she was 14. ‘Family girl’ McGowan, who would spend every moment of summer holidays with her grandmother, found leaving home for a training base in Manchester at 16 tough going.

The walls of the National Taekwondo Centre in east Manchester are adorned with a gallery of legends: Sarah Stevenson, who got the ball rolling with bronze in Beijing, two-time Olympic champion Jade Jones and her best friend Bianca Cook (nee Walkden), who has dominated the women’s heavyweight division for a decade. McGowan suddenly found herself in the most exalted company.

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“When I first moved to Manchester, I went through a little phase of not knowing who I was,” she admits. “The team had a certain style of doing things and one that’s working. As an athlete, you want to fit into that but I didn’t know what my own style was and what I was contributing.

“You only get so far trying to be someone else. You have your own skills for a reason, your little niches, unique ways of doing things and fighting. There’s a winning formula but it’s about how you implement that to be the best version of yourself you can be.”

McGowan is one of over 1,000 elite athletes on UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class Programme, allowing them to train full time, have access to the world’s best coaches and benefit from pioneering medical support – this is vital for their pathway to the Paris 2024 Games.

McGowan’s path from cadet to senior level, converting world junior bronze to an equivalent senior silver, looks to the naked eye like smooth sailing. But she had ankle surgery as a junior athlete and tore her anterior cruciate ligament just after joining the GB set-up in 2019.

The injury that upturned her perspective, however, was a hip concern that required surgery three years ago.

Hip pain will trouble her for the first of her life. It was into that context that 'seven arrows', a powerful, minimalist approach to training and competition, was born.

"I've had to learn how to manage the pain," she says. "It's given me a whole new mindset towards training, competing, everything. I'm not able to train the other way people do.

"I'm only allowed to kick so many days a week so I make sure to do what is productive for me, rather than trying to keep up with everyone. I was doing sessions at not even 80% of my capability.

"Now I always talk about having seven arrows. We have seven arrows and we try to make each one of them count.

"Heavyweights tend to like a slower pace of game. I'm different because I'm a lot more explosive and faster than other people. I learned the basics at such a young age and I can do things that the other heavyweight girls can't. I have different weapons and that's my x-factor.

"I don't have the longest legs in the division but I've got really good distance management, I can time things really well and I use that to my advantage. I think I fight more like a boy than any of the other girls.

"There have been a lot of setbacks and trying to just keep on going and doing what I can do. One of my old team-mates used to tell me to trust the process and that’s what I’ve done."

'Seven arrows' has delivered a stunning run of podium finishes at majors. McGowan has put herself in pole position to pip Cook to the single Olympic heavyweight spot with World Championship bronze in 2022 and silver in 2023, added to a European title in 2021 and continental bronze in Manchester a year later.

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Selection to Team GB is not as straightforward as it might seem, with Cook having undergone surgery on both knees, meaning that she was not at 100% at a crucial selection event in Manchester in December. But purely based on results, McGowan has a very strong case.

“I just focus on myself and doing what I need to do. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of. There can be a lot of white noise in the background with there being a legacy behind. But I did what I wanted to do, getting the medals I needed to get to be in a very good position in making sure I’m the one to go.

“Being able to get that experience (in Tokyo) gave me a fire in my belly that I’ve never had before. I’d done almost the entire prep and not being able to do that final part, I wasn’t going to do it again for this one, I was making sure I was going to be the one that was fighting there.”

Studying physiotherapy at the University of Salford gives McGowan a healthy injection of perspective when it comes to the vagaries of Olympic selection.

"A lot of people think it would be stressful to have that on the side," said McGowan. "But it takes me out of the bubble to spend time with normal people who aren't kicking each other in the head all day.

"A few of the people I study with work in intensive care. We're in a high-intensity environment but we're not dealing with people's lives - that brings you back to reality."  

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