In Jordan Thomas’s chosen sport, his legs are his lethal weapon. But Britain’s No 1 karate kid was once told he may not even be able to walk on those now super-strong limbs after he was hit by a car when he was two which left him lying unconscious on the road with a broken femur.
“It happened right outside my home in Luton,’ says the 2016 world champion, who is bidding to become Britain’s first Olympic karateka when the martial art makes its debut in Tokyo next year. ‘My brother crossed the road to go and see one of his friends and I followed him, he recalled”.
“I went out on to the road and I got hit by a car, snapping my right femur in half. I also cracked my head open. I was knocked out.”
” Mum heard the screaming outside and she instantly knew that something bad had happened. She ran out and saw me lying on the road. Did she think I had died? That’s the first thought when you see a kid just lying in the road, not moving.”
“Then the doctor said there was a chance I’d never walk again and recover properly. Luckily, I have strong parents who managed to get through it. But still to this day, my family talks about how stressful it all was.”
But instead of letting that accident affect his life, it turned out to be the making of Thomas, whose parents enrolled him in gymnastics lessons as part of his rehabilitation.
Thomas then took up karate at the age of four — the sport in which his dad, William, was also a world champion in 1992.
“I have been punching and kicking since I was born,” he says. Thomas is so flexible that, while he speaks to Sportsmail before training at the National Taekwondo Centre in Manchester, he sits doing the splits — for comfort.
After so much struggle and sacrifice to become world champion in 2016, Thomas’s career was nearly cut short just six months later when he came close to losing his eyesight.
” I clashed on a punch and a thumb caught the inside of my eye,’ recalls Thomas about the European Championships in Turkey. It tore the tear duct in my left eye. They said that if it was one centimeter deeper, I would have lost some vision. It was worrying at the time because I couldn’t see it. They sent me off to hospital in an ambulance for emergency surgery.”
Fortunately, those Turkish medics were correct and Thomas got his full vision back. Now he has his eyes set on next year’s rearranged Tokyo Olympics.
Due to coronavirus, Thomas’s next competition is not until March 2021, and the Olympic qualifiers are now that June.
