Peter Shokeir | [email protected]
A local martial artist recently won gold as a black belt during the Alberta Taekwondo Open at MacEwan University in Edmonton this past weekend.
Dez-Rohan Godfrey was able to achieve this despite getting involved in a car accident and injuring his leg while returning from a tournament in Whitecourt last November.
“I was basically in rehab to get everything going, and I was nervous about this tournament, but I went here and surprised myself,” Godfrey said.
“I’m actually a 100 per cent, but, yeah, I managed to pull this off this last Sunday.”
Godfrey previously came home with two medals in 2019. This is his third championship win in six months.
Godfrey has been practicing Taekwondo for 24 years and currently teaches kickboxing and Muay Thai in Jasper as well as taekwondo in Hinton. He also started competing in 2018.
“And that is the last time I lost a fight,” Godfrey said.
The recent Alberta Taekwondo Open was his first major tournament since COVID and featured over 400 athletes.
Despite the lack of competition for close to three years, Godfrey assured that neither he nor any of the other competitors had lost their edge.
“You can tell that these guys are sharp, because they train. They train and they train.”
Next year, he is looking forward to going to nationals, which he had to skip this year due to the accident.
Godfrey dedicated his win to mental health and those struggling with some form of mental health issue.
“The reason I did this was because of what was going on during COVID, and coming out of COVID, there are a lot of people that have all these kinds of problems and so forth mentally, so I did this so that they know they’re not alone in this trouble.”
“I actually feel really good doing it,” he added. “I wasn’t only fighting for me. I was fighting for other people, too.”
