JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia’s national taekwondo team has arrived in the Turkish city of Antalya for their latest training camp ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, which will begin in Paris on July 26.
The male and female team members include Donia Abu Taleb, the sole Saudi to have secured automatic qualification for the Olympics, Riyad Hamdi, Yousef Jaar, Abdullah Al-Mushrif, Abdulrahman Al-Shamrani, Zakria Ghali and Ahmed bin Qasim.
The Saudi Arabian Taekwondo Federation recently hired Russian coach Kurban Bogdaev, who guided Tunisian athlete Mohammed Jendoubi to silver in the sport at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, to take charge of the national team.
The training camp in Turkey will continue until July 7 and then the team will head to South Korea for the Chuncheon Korea Open International Taekwondo Championships. After that they will return to the Kingdom, while Abu Taleb completes her individual training program for the Olympics.
The director of the national team, Nasser Al-Qahtani, said all team members had reached the required levels of fitness and technical prowess.
“Donia Abu Taleb will be going through a different program to prepare her for the big event, the Paris Olympics,” he added.
Abu Taleb, the first Saudi woman to secure direct qualification for the Olympics, recently reached another historic milestone when she broke into the top five in the official world rankings for her under-53-kilogram weight category. She recently won gold at the Asian Games and is now ranked fourth in the world, the first martial artist from the Kingdom to reach such a level.
During a recent training session in Abha, organized by the Saudi Taekwondo Federation, the Saudi team took to the mats against athletes from Russia, Uzbekistan, Palestine, Kazakhstan and Gabon.
