Olympic Bronze medal back within reach for Jack Woolley after reprieve

Ireland's Jack Woolley after his defeat by Gashim Magomedov in the men's 58kg round of 16 at the Grand Palais. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

Jack Woolley’s hopes of claiming a taekwondo medal in the 2024 Olympic Games have been dramatically revived with the progress of Gashim Magomedov through to the final.

If that sounds odd and just a little hard to get your head around then that’s okay. Taekwondo is up there with the more complicated of the Olympics' many and varied formats.

The Irishman lost his 58kg fight 2-0 in rounds to the Azerbaijani earlier on Wednesday. It meant that his only lifeline at that point could come with a bronze medal repechage route – but only if Magomedov made it through to the gold medal match.

It didn’t look likely.

Accounting for Ireland’s seventh seed was one thing but Magomedov, tenth in the rankings, then put in two more devastating performances to knock out Spain’s Adrian Vicente Yunta and Italy’s Vito Dell Aquila, who are second and third seeds respectively.

It means Woolley, who had to wait hours in purgatory waiting for events to unfold, now faces Yunta in his next fight. Win that and he would be fighting for a bronze medal and with the possibility that Tunisia’s top seed could be his opponent there.

It’s still a daunting path for the Tallaght man and maybe the hardest part of it will be in wrapping his head around his second chance as his demeanour and his words after the initial defeat suggested a man all but resigned to his fate.

“I don’t think anybody comes to the Olympics to not get a medal,” he had said. “I’m obviously very devastated but if you’d told me six months ago that I’d be here in the first place I’d laugh at you.

“To go out against an opponent who I know is really tough because we’ve fought each other… That’s the third time now. It was 1-1 going into that and unfortunately today it didn’t go according to plan.

“The fact that he is a good opponent is good for me because if he makes it to the final I can get back in and go for a bronze medal but that’s out of my hands now. I don’t want to dwell on that too much. I’ll be ready to go back into the ring when I have to.” 

Woolley is due out again at the Grand Palais at 7.06pm Irish time.