Carl Alan Nickolas Jr. aka C.J. Nickolas is determined not just to compete but to become a gold medalist at the 2024 Paris Olympics, as the U.S. aims for a Taekwondo comeback after not sending any male athletes to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Nickolas is the top-ranked American taekwondo athlete and is ranked second overall in the world for the 176-pound weight class. When he won a silver medal at the 2023 World Championships at 80 kilograms or 176 pounds, it became the first U.S. medal in that event since 2009. After becoming number 2 in the world rankings in January, he qualified for the Olympics.
At the age of three, Nickolas began training with his mother, who was a huge influence on his career. He recalled begging his mother to enroll him in karate classes after he watched the Power Rangers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on television growing up.
“My mom was smart. She looked up combat sports for a kid and found martial arts that are in the Olympics, where you could build a career. And she found this random taekwondo school and put me in it,” he told NBC News.
He shared that six Black women raised him which provided him with stability and the support to take up taekwondo and thrive in it.
His 62-year-old mother, Denise Nickolas, who had also engaged in the sport, earned a black belt before she retired a few years ago.
Nickolas recounted to Teen Vogue, “She was taking classes and she was better than me and she kept going up until two years ago — I had to make her stop. She was fighting 18-year-old girls and she’s 63. She got home with bruises and stuff. I was like, ‘shorty, you gotta chill.”
Ahead of the Olympics, Nickolas spent most of his days training in the gym. “I have a 9-to-5. We have two training sessions a day, one from 9 to 11 and then one from 2 to 4. But those times change and the training changes. In-between training, I’m either going to meetings, taking a nap or something like that, getting physio done.”
He also spent some time in Korea, where Taekwondo originated, he said. The 23-year-old further said of his qualification for the Games, “…What I’m really happy about is everybody else is happy for me, my family, seeing how excited they are that I’m going and all the hard work that my mom put in for me and everyone that’s poured into me, they’re just so happy for me and I’m glad that I can make them proud.”
A two-time British Olympic medalist, Lutalo Muhammad, said of the young prodigy, “He’s one of my hot picks to get the gold in welterweight, which is my old division. America is back. They have a great team, they have a great coach … they’ve got young hungry athletes.”
Viewers can follow along and watch Nickolas compete at the Grand Palais in the Paris Olympics taekwondo competition between August 7-10, 2024.
