Matt Bush was the coolest cat under the Grand Palais roof as he made history with Paralympic taekwondo gold.
The Welshman showed nerves of steel to totally dominate his final in the +80kg, beating neutral athlete Aliaskhab Ramazanov 5-0.
Bush is not given to extreme shows of emotion and instead clinically dispatched his opponent to make history for ParalympicsGB.
“My coaches break things down for me and tell me what we want to be doing out there,” said Bush, who is part of Aldi’s Nearest and Dearest programme in partnership with Team GB, helping to maximise support and minimise potential distractions for athletes so that they can focus on their performance.
“Then I’ve just got to get it through my thick skull and try to execute it out there. My goal was to shut him down, smother him, stop his opportunities to score.”
A former shot putter who missed out on Rio 2016 due to injury, Bush spotted his chance to win a Paralympic medal when taekwondo was added to the Games programme.
Switching to the sport in 2017, he became GB’s first-ever world champion in 2019.
Having been selected for the Tokyo Games and a favourite for gold, Bush got injured on the eve of the competition and had to withdraw.
“I thought taekwondo was going to be a bit of a side quest, that I would do my normal life and nip in and get a gold but it didn’t work out that way,” said Bush.
“It’s a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of injuries, a lot of time, but we just persevered. I learned a lot from the injuries and the setback and I grew a lot as a person.”
GB won two taekwondo golds in one Parisian night with Amy Truesdale and Bush becoming the nation’s first-ever champions in the sport.
“Everyone invests a lot of time and effort into us and sometimes we don’t always give back what we could,” said Bush. “This time, it’s really good to be able to get the results for the team, for the families who travelled out here and the people who stuck around and watched.”
Bush is still the UK number one in his classification in shot put and plans to revisit the field discipline in the coming years.
“I wish I could have done it at the same time but the competition schedules are rough,” he said. “I’ll be speaking to my shot-put coach, he’s in Paris with another athlete, about whether I can get back to making those two lines up and throw the shot put as well.”
Aldi are proud Official Partners of Team GB & ParalympicsGB, supporting all athletes through to Paris 2024.
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