By Keiran Gorsky
It was an odd little taekwondo school young Laila Khan trained at a decade ago. Her instructor was trying desperately to rid himself of the place, worryingly close to bankruptcy.
There was nothing remarkable about the club, coach George Koh recalls – even the instructor only sported a green belt. Nothing remarkable, save for one little girl – strangely serious, impossibly intense, charged with a “certain amount of rage.”
“‘I’m only going to buy the school from you because I want that girl,’” Koh remembers saying. “From looking at her train when she was seven years old, I knew that she was going to be special.”
As a kid, Khan was “really really shy and quiet.” It was scary at first, she recalls, stepping out on the mat to meet a flurry of fists.
Athletes are seldom the same in and out of their domain, but Khan’s taekwondo quickly took on a life of its own. She loves it now, every second of it, but there remains, perhaps, still a certain amount of rage.
“I’m at a point right now where I feel like there’s a necessary level of stress,” Khan explains. “I don’t feel overwhelmed, but it kind of fuels me.”
Khan’s steady rise, since her early days training under Koh at Phoenix TKD on Ottawa’s east side, recently hit a new peak, as the 18-year-old debuted at her first senior world championships.
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She stormed onto the national senior scene in February at the Canadian championships, besting three more experienced fighters in Megan Brewster, Sophi Tatianchenko and Sophia Fokas en route to a gold medal.
Her rookie season culminated with a recent trip to Wuxi, China, where she represented Canada as one of the youngest on the team.
Competing in the women’s 53-kilogram category, Khan received a bye pas the opening round of competition but drew a very tough first opponent in India’s Shrutika Takale.
Koh lost video replay access early on after a failed coach’s challenge, leaving them unable to challenge any unscored points or missed penalties. When the going gets tough, Khan’s only recourse is to latch onto every ounce of strength she can muster.
She might be a defensive fighter first and foremost, but when the fortress is breached, her fights turn into fierce scraps. Her first round against Takale (18-14) was the highest scoring of the tournament.
“If [defence] doesn’t work, all hell breaks loose,” Koh underlines.
Khan won a less frenetic second round 8-6 to advance to the Round of 16, though not without a price. Khan felt physically ill after the fact. She resigned herself to lying down between fights, a bag of ice over her head. When she stood up, she was hit by a sudden wave of nausea. She proceeded to throw up into a bag.
“It was really physically taxing on me,” Khan admits. “Afterwards all I could do was try not to think about it.”
Khan prevailed in another very close bout with Baby Jessica Canabal of the Philippines that went the full three rounds in the next round.
But she wasn’t anywhere near 100% by the time she met Dunya Abutaleb in the quarter-finals. Khan was leading for parts of both rounds before the Asian champion and 2024 Olympian penetrated her defence with a series of swift strikes. Abutaleb beat Khan 9-7 and 9-4 and went on to win the silver medal.
“It was a really close fight and that is really frustrating,” Khan explains. “You can think about that forever, what you could have done, how you could have beaten this person.”
Khan says taekwondo is a sport that never allows her to feel particularly at ease, especially before the first fight of a tournament.
Away from the mat, things don’t get much easier. Khan spent her final year of high school almost entirely online, while flying to tournaments all over the world, including the 2024 junior world championships in South Korea, where she lost her first match and returned home.
There were many far more sparkling results, including medals in Belgium, Brazil and at September’s Pan American President’s Cup in Peru. The travel was made possible in part by the Petro-Canada Fuelling Athlete and Coaching Excellence grant she and Koh received.
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It was all very impressive, but not always easy for her friends outside of taekwondo to understand why she was so frequently absent. Khan is now two months into her first semester at Carleton University, majoring in cognitive science, where her workload has intensified dramatically.
What semblance there was of a work-life balance in secondary school might slowly wither away. When she explains to her fellow fighters how she juggles it all, many of them former and prospective Olympians who spend every waking hour in training, they are convinced she can’t be serious.
“They actually think we’re joking when we say [they] go to school,” Koh says of his students at Phoenix.
Among them, Leonarda Andric, a biomedical health science student at the University of Ottawa who won a FISU Games medal in the summer. Andric also made her debut at the senior worlds in China, winning one match and losing her next to exit in the round of 16.
It isn’t easy being perpetually on edge, but Khan and Koh maintain her ability to manage those emotions and to tap them for extra motivation in the heat of the moment is what ultimately sets her apart from others.
Being one of the most promising young fighters in the world, it’s impossible for Olympic prospects not to be constantly at the back of her mind. Khan knows, from Andric’s experience pursuing a 2024 Games berth, that it takes more than just being the best Canadian in her weight class to make it there, due to stringent limits on the number of athletes each country can enter.
Mingling with Canadian Olympians in Skylar Park and Josipa Kafadar while in China, Khan never felt that they were out of her league.
“Obviously, they’re Olympians. It’s hard. You have to be good to make that process,” Khan says. “But I don’t hold them that much higher above which I hold myself.”