Rio 2016: Jade Jones, Team GB's warrior queen, is front-kicking her way into Olympic fable

The 23-year-old North Walian captured imaginations on her way to her second Olympic gold

Jones poses with her second Olympic gold medal (Getty)

Jade Jones walked on to the taekwondo mat a little after 10pm local time, which was effectively in the Usain Bolt delta. By the time her golden bout had concluded the Olympic Stadium was consumed with Bolt mania, as the man of the epoch stretched and flexed his way through his 200 metre final warm up.

To the rest of the world Jones simply fed into the Team GB ticker tape of wondrous plunder, the 22nd gold and 56th medal of these Games. Move on.

Yet Jones is also kicking her way into Olympic fable, her roundhouse whack into the midriff of an opponent as potent a symbol of her pedigree as the Bolt lighting pose. Spain’s Eva Calvo is to be commended for stretching the 23-year-old North Walian after falling behind 6-0 in the opening round.

Calvo’s response required Jones to summon her best to prevail, a quality that differentiates the great ones. With the advantage narrowed to 7-6 after the second round Jones went deep into her repertoire in the final two minutes of the bout, eventually running out a 16-7 winner.

At just 23 the the warrior queens at 57 kilos are looking at a grim vista should Jones retain her enthusiasm for the Olympic hunt.

Calvo had all the attributes, an advantage in height and reach, yet Jones was on her like a precision tool, picking her clean with lacerating feet to land four, totemic head shots across the bout, worth three points each, and two of those in that critical final round.

Not for nothing is she know as the headhunter. “It feels surreal to be honest. It still doesn’t feel real that I won in London so to have done it again is just crazy,” she said. “I’m so proud of myself because I didn’t realise how much pressure I would feel coming into these Games.


 Jones lands a kick on opponent Calvo Gomez 
 (Getty)

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

“I know inside I’m the best but you can still lose so it’s such a scary feeling. You’ve trained for four years of your life, six hours a day, and when it pays off it just feels amazing.”

Her coach Paul Green believes Jones is still improving. “She is better tactically than she was four years ago. She understands the game better, she is a lot faster and stronger than her opponents and she always rises on the big days.”

We have to reverse 18 months to locate Jones’s last defeat, by a single point in the world championship quarter-finals after the electronic scoring system crashed. By then she had begun to understand her status in the game having taken a while to process the significance of her achievement as a teenager in 2012.

It was Green who took her to task after a previous defeat at the quarter final stage of the world championships, forcing her to reappraise her attitude and approach. “I had been thinking I've got to win because I'm Olympic champion; actually, no, it's 'I'm an Olympic champion for life', I should be making them nervous, not the other way round. I changed my whole attitude to it," she told Anna Kessel of the Guardian.

Jones shares elements of the elfin qualities and blue-eyed sheen of track cyclist Laura Trott. By no means diminutive at 5ft 7ins, she is nevertheless running a build deficit to the new wave of taekwondo titans.

Both remind us that size is never the ultimate arbiter. It matters sure enough, but not nearly as much as the blow torch that burns within. Once that fire is stoked, you’d better get out of there.