Carmen Marton Interview
It's time to get your first taste of Taekwondo on the show today as we speak with three-time Australian Olympian Carmen Marton about her extraordinary career! We find out from Carmen just why she got into the sport and why it turned into a bit of a family business for her and her brother and sister. We also find out about the thrill of becoming Australia's first ever World Champion in the sport and what that achievement meant to her. Added to this we also learn some very honest details about her experiences with the sport in Australia and just what it will take to bring some further improvements to the sport moving forward. It's an honest and raw interview that you will be blown away by so get to listening and experience it for yourself!
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note this is an automated transcript that may contain errors.
BEN WATERWORTH: It is Off The Podium, an Olympics podcast coming to you today, again for another athlete interview. And in the great words of a OK commentator, boy, oh boy, wowee, do we have an amazing guest for you today on a celebratory episode. Our 100th ever guest here on Off The Podium, Carmen Marton, taekwondo world champion from 2013, free time Olympian and our first ever taste of the sport of taekwondo on this show. And this is a fantastic, fantastic interview. A very honest Carmen goes into a lot of detail about the sport in Australia, some of the issues faced by taekwondo athletes in this country and kind of what it's going to take really to overcome a lot of that. It's really the crux of this interview, really honest and an in-depth account of what is happening in the sport, particularly over the last 20 or so years, sort of is disgust a lot of people probably remember taekwondo for the first time at the Sydney Olympics with Lauren Burns and Daniel Trenton both coming away with medals and very exciting to see this new sport at the Olympics. And you would think that would spur on greater and bigger and better things in the sport in the country, but has not been the case at all. So Carmen, very honest and open about that situation. She talks about how she got into the sport. She's basically from the first family of taekwondo in Australia. Both her brother and sister are also Olympians. So an incredible chat here also goes into detail about her three Olympic experiences, how she very nearly made it a fourth back in Athens, and also giving her the distinction of being the 100th guest. We may save that towards the end and really give her a boost towards the tilt towards Paris 2024. So here is our very great chat with three-time Australian Olympic taekwondo athlete Carmen Marton.
BEN WATERWORTH: So excited for today's guest on Off The Podium. We always get excited, of course, when we can speak to an athlete from a sport that we've never covered before on the show, and we have never covered the sport of Tae Kwon Do. And today, we are going to ticket Off The List. Our guest today is a three-time Olympian, a former world champion in the sport, and really comes from what is called, I guess, the first family of Tae Kwon Do in Australia. And I'm very excited to learn a little bit more about her Olympic journey and everything else in between. Please welcome to the show Carmen Marton. Carmen, first of all, welcome to Off The Podium. It's a pleasure to speak with you today.
CARMEN MARTON: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's exciting to talk about, as I said, a sort of a new sport we've never covered before. And I mean, look, as an Australian, and I guess many Australians, our first real taste of this sport came back in Sydney. We all remember watching Lauren Burns, of course, winning gold back then and sort of the memories of that. But I mean, your journey obviously started a little bit before Sydney. Carmen, kind of like what drew you into Tae Kwon Do? How did you get started in the sport?
CARMEN MARTON: Well, I started when I was about eight years old and did not have a choice. My father, he absolutely loves Tae Kwon Do. Both my parents are originally from Poland, and he started Tae Kwon Do with his brother there. And when it came to Australia and we were born, we pretty much were forced into it. So by we, I mean myself and my siblings, I have an older sister and a younger brother too, who all do the sport.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which all kind of worked out for you, you're all Olympians, right? So kind of the parents pushing you to kind of do something sort of, you know, the family business, like literally pushed you through it and look at what you've achieved.
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, definitely. In retrospect, you know, we are very grateful. Growing up in a Tae Kwon Do family can be a little bit tough, especially with that sort of Eastern European mentality from our father, who was, you know, quite stern and hard on us, I guess, in terms of just pushing us. And we did have to do a lot of extra Tae Kwon Do sessions at home, as well as our standard group classes. But it paid off. And I think once we were older and we were able to see the benefit for ourselves and, I think, choose for ourselves to continue in the sport, then things really became a lot more, I think, just positive in the sense that we realised that sport's really special and it took us around the world and it kept us really close as siblings. And, you know, that's something that we're very grateful for. Like, I guess, as a kid, you can be a little bit lazy and you'd rather play computer games, as I did, or go to sleep and nap, watch TV.
BEN WATERWORTH: Not only for kids, right? Oh, I might need to grow out of that phase. Maybe one day. But it must be interesting, sort of, then, in a sport like taekwondo, which obviously, say, during the 90s was just on the cusp of making an Olympics in Sydney, I mean, do you sort of grow up playing other sports with maybe Olympic aspirations? Was the Olympics only something that sort of, as you progressed in taekwondo, that sort of became on the horizon then?
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, so I loved playing basketball in primary school and in high school, I played volleyball. So my sister and I played for our high school team, which is really competitive in volleyball. And we also played in the state team in volleyball, which was so much fun to be able to do a team sport compared to taekwondo, which is an individual sport. And yet didn't have the aspirations to be an Olympian at all as a child. There was more, once I knew that I had to do taekwondo, then I didn't want to be a world champion. And it's really funny because our old head instructor, he would tell me that I was going to be a world champion one day, and my father would be like, you can be a world champion one day. So I was just like, okay, I guess I'm going to be a world champion one day. I took it, you know, you can call it being, being naive or just having, you know, pretty amazing positive reinforcement. But yeah, I think I was empowered from a young age to go for the top level in the sport. And I didn't really see any real barriers in doing that.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which I believe you made the senior team when you were 14, which if I'm not mistaken, doing my maths, that would have been about the year 2000, right? So you're kind of making that team the same year that Taekwondo is debuting at the Olympics, is that right?
CARMEN MARTON: Oh gosh, that was 21 years ago. I'm impressed with your research. So yeah, I was, that's correct, 14 when I made my first senior Australian team, and we travelled to Vietnam for the World Cup. And I was like, probably about like six months before that, I went on my first team overseas to the Korean Open as a junior, and I was hooked. Like I thought that it was just the most incredible thing to be on an aeroplane, go to a different country, experience a completely different culture, all these different foods, go to the market, go on these adventures. And then to be able to do that on the senior team as well, where you have like even more probably freedom. I was like, OK, I want to do this for as long as possible.
BEN WATERWORTH: That's incredible. And I mean, such a young age too, to kind of make it like in that sport. Like, I mean, gosh, like you sort of set yourself those targets you're doing, and you're 14 and you sort of, you know, you're pretty much there already, aren't you?
CARMEN MARTON: Well, it's in our sport. I think the females, their bodies develop a lot faster than males. Like at 14 years old, I was already 55 kilos and fighting women. And I think that in terms of the power ratio, there isn't much difference in terms of a woman fighting a junior female. You can handle yourself. It is a little bit different when you compare a fully grown male fighting a young junior boy than that sort of power discrepancy in terms of the physiology of the body. It can be a bit of a wider gap. But also in saying that, our sport and our club, the females punch on with the males in class. So we are fighting those older males and adult males. Obviously, they're looking after us to make sure they don't hurt us or kick us too hard. But we were raised quite tough. And so as juniors, we could handle ourselves. And it's a great score for that. You do build a lot of confidence because you train really hard and then you're able to transfer that to the competition day.
BEN WATERWORTH: In terms of you mentioned the weight there, obviously, taekwondo is a sport where it's not like swimming, where you're just going to choose, I'm going to be a freestyler, I'm going to be a breaststroke. This comes down to your weight and your physicality. Does that as you develop and you're growing, and you obviously change divisions essentially throughout your career, does that come down to a coaching choice that a coach goes, okay, if you drop a bit of weight, you might be more competitive. If you put on a bit more weight, you might be competitive. How is that handled as an athlete? How do you then work out what you want to achieve by putting your body through the rigours of either putting on or losing weight?
CARMEN MARTON: That's a great question. In our sport, it's changing in terms of families, coaches, parents, are becoming a lot more educated in the weight division process and how to choose the weight division. Usually, as a junior, it's recommended that you go with your growth spurt. You go and you just go into the next weight category until you sort of balance out and plateau. And then as the senior athlete, you can start choosing which divisions you want to compete in, because maybe if you're taller, you may want to drop a couple of kilos and go in a slightly lighter weight division, because then strategically you might have a tactical advantage because you've got a height advantage. In other instances, you may find that you may have more of an opportunity in a heavier weight division. So then you'll put on more muscle mass and then explore a heavier weight division or do a little bit of water loading. So those conversations I did have with both my coaches and my parents. As a junior, I did go through a growth spurt, and I did start having to cut weight, and that was not nice at all to do that during high school. To be able to have all your calories and be able to learn, especially through your VCE, is really important. So to have that extra challenge of having to cut weight made that whole experience a lot more difficult. It is an added layer. You have a choice if you want to take that advantage, and you can explore. And I encourage all athletes within our sport to explore, but if possible, leave that until you are more developed in your senior years. You don't necessarily have to be cutting weight as a junior. Definitely you wouldn't consider that as a cadet being even younger. And when you are ready to explore different weight divisions, connect with professionals. So dieticians, sports dieticians, to help you form good habits from a younger age, which is very, very important. And then to have that support, that emotional support to help you manage your weight division and to make sure that you've got the safe strategies in cutting weight.
BEN WATERWORTH: In terms of the physical aspect of it, I do love when we chat to our combat athletes, the different methodologies and the training you've got to do in different sports. Is taekwondo similar in a way to boxing, where the agility aspect is obviously so key to it, as well as the physical strength? You've got to dodge around a little bit on the mat, you've got to use the fancy footwork and all that sort of stuff. Can you do things like Harry Garci, do some ballet or something along those lines, and help with the agility? How's that balance with, say, agility versus strength going into training?
CARMEN MARTON: You need all aspects, and it's great that Harry did that with ballet, and we've incorporated some of that maybe more with our core work and our stretching and flexibility and mobility. And as an athlete and as a coach, you're pushing the boundaries in terms of what can you learn, what can you benefit. And when you're at the top level, you're trying to find out ways, OK, what can give me the edge, or how can I learn from a different sport that maybe is outside of the box in how our sport has always approached things. And I went to university because after my first Olympics in Beijing, we were based at the AIS, and there was next to no information about strength and conditioning or sports science in Taekwondo. So I was like, OK, this is a big hole. I want to learn what's specific to our sport and how we can be the best and how we can be an actual professional sport and a professional athlete. And you need all those aspects. You learn about the different systems in your body, and you realise that Taekwondo is a sport which is really complex because you've got your anaerobic anaerobic system. So you need explosive short bursts, but then you also need a longer fitness because we have three rounds of two minutes, but all our fights are done in one day. And when you're competing at the World Championships, you can have six to seven fights in the one day. So you need to address all those systems. You definitely need your agility. So we do agility training. We do our sprints. We do hill sprints, stair work, we do our weight training. So depending on how far out we are from a competition, and we're periodising, we've got a good strength base, but then we go into explosive power lifting, as well as plyometric jumps. And then from there, you have to also do all your taekwondo sessions, which is technique work, ring management, fighting scenarios, as well as the full contact fighting days as well.
BEN WATERWORTH: And the strategy side of things too, is that something that comes down to, you're talking about having all those bouts in one day, that, okay, this is how I'm an aggressive fighter, I'm going to go for the attacker, I'm defensive. Or again, does it always come down to who you're fighting against? This is a more attacking competitor, I need to be more defensive or kind of counter them with that? Like, does it all come from the coach and different levels at different competitions?
CARMEN MARTON: Again, there are so many layers to this question. You'll find that some fights, it comes down to your performance state. So how focused you are. And you're going to be purely in the fight and purely reactive, and you're going to be fighting your best self, and you make decisions based on what's happening in real time, what's unfolding in front of you. And then there are other fights which do need more strategy, which maybe if you're coming up against a very experienced opponent, you need one or two tactics to possibly outsmart them or shut down their game and shut down a strength of them so you're not going to be scored on something that they're really good at. And as an athlete, you need to take a level of responsibility and autonomy in learning about your athletes, learning about particular trends, having a sort of your own database on which countries have got particular styles and they might be good at a particular kick, and then you've got your particular athletes which have got their own distinct style. And then you also work with your coach, and then your coach and yourself will come up with a gaming plan, and then it's about rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. So there's definitely, I think, you can... Like there's different styles of fighting, and then being a little bit... You might find that you're a little bit more aggressive or a little bit more defensive, but then... Naturally, but then that can change, depending on the fight, depending who you're up against. And then the nature of the fight, yeah.
BEN WATERWORTH: Did you have sort of a style that you were particularly... Like were you more aggressive, were you more defensive? Kind of, has it sort of changed throughout your career?
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, it's changed throughout my career. Probably growing up in my earlier senior years, I was more of a defensive fighter, and I had to build up my strength and confidence to be more of a well-rounded fighter and have more confidence going in on the attack. And as the sport has changed and the style has changed, especially because of the introduction of the electronic shields and headguards, then everyone's style changed and has evolved over the years globally because of that. So you're always finding new, innovative ways to score points and control the match itself, even just depending on technology.
BEN WATERWORTH: Because the thing that's amazing about taekwondo and so many of these combat sports is that, I guess, you can go out there and kind of just score the points, but then all of a sudden, within the dying seconds, what, a kick to the head and all of a sudden, boom, like you can sort of take it right at the end. I mean, you famously did that with your world championship win. So I mean, like, kind of it's kind of one of these sports where you could probably be, you know, either I can imagine like, oh, I'm just going to be tactical here and just go for the points or just bugger it. Five seconds ago, boom, let's go for the knockout or whatever you refer to it in Taekwondo.
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, that's what makes our sports sport really exciting. And with the different point system, so like our body shots is one point. If you do a turning body shots, that's an extra two points, that's four points in total. Our headshots is three points, and our turning headshots five points now. So the scores can change quite rapidly. And you see those fights, you see someone that is up the whole match. And then in the last 30 seconds, they either start freaking out or they gas out, their legs give away, and you just see their opponent come at them and pick them off point and point and point and point at a time. And there were quite a lot of fights at the recent Olympics where they were won in the final two seconds.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which it must be a pretty amazing feeling then, if you can kind of land the spinning head kick in the dying second set. Like, I mean, that's like hitting a home run, kicking a goal after the siren, like kind of these little moments where the adrenaline just must be pumping through you so much.
CARMEN MARTON: It is, and I'm very blessed, I guess, in terms of the way that you imagine winning the World Championships, probably as a child, like with the stands, full, going crazy, your verse in Korea, which is like the homeland of Taekwondo. So everyone that comes out of Korea is awesome, and you win in the final seconds. So I think I had maybe seven seconds on the scoreboard left when I landed like a turning head kick to the face. And when I reflect back on that, it was just such a beautiful moment because I was so completely in the fight. I don't even remember. It wasn't even a thought. I didn't even think about doing that kick. It just came out. And my grandmaster, head instructor from my club, would say that, you know, when you reach that master level, it's not about seeing something and then doing it. It's doing something, and then you see it. And that's exactly how it was. So I had done the kick, and then I saw that I had done the kick. So it was, yeah, it was a pretty epic moment in my career.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's amazing. I mean, you were the first ever world champion in the sport of taekwondo, which is crazy to think that, that we had an Olympic champion before we had a world champion. And it obviously took a bit of time. I mean, you were saying before, though, that kind of that was your goal. Initially, it was, hey, I want to be a world champion. So, I mean, I can imagine at that moment, too, you're all of a sudden, hey, I've realised this dream that I had since I got into this sport.
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, and I remember just laughing. Like you think you're going to, you know, get emotional and cry, but I was I just I knew I knew I would just fall on the ground. Like that's sort of like you are you're exhausted because you are floored by it because it's 20 years worth. It's not just the six fights that I had that day. Wasn't the, you know, eight weeks and months and months preparation. It was 20 years worth of getting to that point. And I was laughing because I was like, you did it like, and I knew I could do it. But then you're like, but you actually did it. And this is just hilarious. And, you know, awesome, like, go you. And I'm just I'm just so happy because like I knew it could be done. And it's so important that it needs to be shown that it can be done, especially for Australian athletes, because we're so removed from the rest of the world in terms of our geography. And that is a barrier within itself within our sport, because you need to get overseas and punch on with the other countries. And it took so much work and a lot of sacrifice and personal investment, money from our parents, our family members, our friends and community and our club that would fundraise for us so we could get overseas and we could show that it is possible. And even during the time when we didn't have a national federation, we didn't have a national program. It was just a group of us kids that got overseas. You know, sometimes we were lucky enough to have one of our coaches over with us. Sometimes we weren't, so we had to run around coaching each other. So it's like whoever happened to lose a fight that day was responsible for coaching everyone. And it was insane, but so awesome, because we were thrown in the deep end and more forced to learn. And throughout all of that, knowing that it is still possible, if you're going to be tenacious enough, resilient enough, and you just keep stepping towards it, keep whatever is thrown at you, just keep working towards it, you'll get there eventually.
BEN WATERWORTH: The thing I'd love to learn sort of about that, sort of that journey is you obviously very nearly made Athens in 2004, so close to that. But how much did the sport change in Australia between Sydney and Athens after Lauren winning gold, Daniel getting a silver as well? Obviously, you know, debut sport, two medals straight away. Were there increasing participation? Did you kind of see a real change in funding and things along those lines sort of in that initial period after Sydney in the lead up to nearly making the Athens Olympics?
CARMEN MARTON: Well, maybe we need to extend your program to two hours.
BEN WATERWORTH: We asked the deep questions apparently today.
CARMEN MARTON: I'm happy to share. Look, I'm all about honesty and being brutally honest. After Sydney, so much investment was put in to those athletes who competed in Sydney. They didn't really have an underlying program. But the expectation was still there for athletes, probably even more so, like, you know, Australia's medals. So now everyone should just be meddling, but it's going to take time to build up the next wave of athletes. And they got together and ended up forming a high performance program in Melbourne, but the culture was really, really poor. The leadership was very shady. They were picking and choosing who they wanted to send on teams, who they wanted to give funding to. They wanted that full commitment to a centralised program, even though everyone's club programs were better. They wanted that control, and if you didn't join, then you were blacklisted. And so that was really, really difficult for a lot of athletes, and it put off a lot of athletes. So that's when our sport started to lose their depth. After Athens, one of the athletes, which was Daniel Trenton, went into a head coaching role, but I don't... And he admits this himself, he did it very poorly. He maybe didn't have the education behind him, or the mentoring to be able to deliver that in a way, which wasn't a very old school authoritarian approach. A lot of athletes were demeaned, emotionally broken, forced to move from their state, so they lost that social support that's really important when you're developing as a young athlete. And again, we lost a whole... Because of that sort of toxic culture, we lost another tier of athletes, and we lost even more depth. And then our sport lost... It's because money was being embezzled from our sport. We lost our national federation status, which means we had no program at all and very little funding, and that's where we had to do a lot of fundraising ourselves. And again, we lost more athletes because there wasn't a clear future. You had to really love your sport and have a good club base where you had coaches that were willing to push you and bring you along and do some fundraising for you in order to enable you to still go overseas and work on your development. And it started probably between 2008 and 2012. Even though we didn't have a national program, the athletes had the freedom to start to travel and work back within, build up and work back within their coach, their club environment and their coaches. And we just created our own high performance program. We were forced to do that. And then, you know, 2013, you know, not only do we have my gold medal win, we had two athletes progress to the round of 16. We started to have even in 2009, like some athletes reached the quarterfinals. I made the quarterfinals in 2011. So it started to lift up again. And then between 2012 and 2016, you know, coaches started to work together again, and we started to get more funding from the AIS or Aus Sport at that time. And they wanted to give us, you know, national... We had a national federation reinstated in terms of the recognition within Australia, so we could get government funding again. But then the leadership defaulted into having coaches in positions again, which they weren't experienced in. They didn't, again, have the proper mentoring and just fell back on bad habits in making programs exclusive, basing decisions on ego, and athletes started to fall off again. And then we once again have gone, this is a very long answer. Olympics, and they tried to force a lot of athletes in this model instead of having two sort of concurrent programs where athletes from club based and those who want to do centralised programs can both be able to receive funding and attention for high performance. And it just showed, and we lost some more athletes again, which is really, really sad. You know, sport isn't just about high performance, it's about providing young people with experiences which can enrich their lives, which can give them tools and skills which they can then use for the rest of their lives. So they can be future leaders, future managers, future trainers or anything that they want to be that sport has given them instead of sport just breaking them and being unfair and unjust because the leadership hasn't done their job properly or they haven't realised they have had a very serious duty of care, and you need to make sure that you're hiring the right people, and those people are actually being checked, and they've got performance reviews. Athletes have performance reviews all the time, but the leadership hasn't had performance reviews for a very long time. Hopefully, they're looking at changing the culture and the coaching staff in the next cycle and building better team environments, building better underlying programs to give opportunities to everyone across Australia instead of just a select few. So that has been the nature of the sport in Australia. I hope your listeners are still with us. Not my best shot at trying to articulate it all in a short amount of time.
BEN WATERWORTH: I have to say, again, there's a whole other episode in that, Carmen. In all seriousness, it's fascinating to hear that because we've had many guests on the show who've talked about certain aspects of the sport and things that I feel are never really discussed. We had a Canadian Nordic combined athlete on earlier this year who basically, in order for us to have good athletes in this sport, we need to have success on the world stage. And to have success on the world stage, you need to have funding. You're not going to get that funding unless you bring home an Olympic medal. It's kind of a vicious cycle, right? What I find really fascinating about that is that Taekwondo has this boom on the Olympic stage. Many of us probably in Australia would not have known anything about this sport if it wasn't for Sydney 2000 and Lauren and what Daniel did. And yet, it kind of doesn't translate into what may be happening in other sports in the world for Olympics, if you know what I mean. So it's fascinating. You could start your own podcast on this and kind of just have weekly a true crime podcast in the nature of Taekwondo in Australia.
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, it's funny you say that. I've spoken to a few athletes even across the world to potentially do a podcast one day and true stories, true crime stories of Australia, not just in Australia, globally.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, I'd listen.
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, there's and it's not just our sport. And unfortunately, the more of this happens in lower profile sports, not low profile, like Olympic sports. So our sport Taekwondo is really popular in other countries and does get a lot of media coverage, does get a lot of funding and support, but unfortunately not in Australia. Look, we're competing against AFL and cricket and rugby, even though there are so many amazing sports, and Australia is such a sporting country. But in order for us to be able to take it to the next level, we need people working within our organisation who understand how can we make this more commercial? How can we market our sport better? How can we potentially get to the level where athletes are professional athletes, like, say, in the UK, where they're getting a wage, they're getting their accommodation paid for, they're getting big money grants each time they win a medal overseas. That would be the ultimate. But we have a long way to go.
BEN WATERWORTH: Again, there's so much to unpack in that, which is just fascinating. Again, what always interests me when it learns is I want to touch on your three Olympic experiences. Now, make your debut in Beijing, go out in the quarterfinals. London, now you make the semis. Now, explain to me how this generally works. Is this an Olympic thing or a taekwondo thing? I would assume you lose the semifinal, you're into a bronze medal bout, the two losing semifinals, but you've then got to go through basically a repertoireed, like, it's a bit confusing. Like, I feel like, do what they do in boxing. You lose a semifinal, you get a bronze medal. Like, don't make it confusing. Like, I don't understand repertoireed charges in sport already, Carmen. So, but, I mean, how do you reflect, say, on London, like, making a semifinal of an Olympic Games? You were talking before about the performances around that stage. There was lots of people making the quarters. You're a year removed from winning a world championship. I mean, did you come out of that feeling all right, that, okay, I made the semis, or was it disappointment that you didn't come away with a medal?
CARMEN MARTON: Well, this whole repertoireed charge fight off for bronze only happens at the Olympics.
BEN WATERWORTH: Wow, okay.
CARMEN MARTON: So the world championships and grand prix's, when you do lose in the semis, you do still come away with a bronze medal, and both sides of the draw have a bronze medal. So yeah, it's tough. That's what makes the Olympics even more ruthless. And no, I was not fine and okay with coming away from London semifinal with nothing. It was heartbreaking. You know, I had so many friends and family members come over to watch and to support. So when you step off the mats, and it was right there, and it was within your grasp, and you come away with nothing, you're just so disappointed and embarrassed. And you have to then face these people that have this look of sadness in their eyes. Not that they're disappointed, but at the same time, they're just like, of course they love you, and they just don't want you to be upset. But you can't help but carry that weight as an athlete, and you feel that responsibility. And you know that it was possible, and it was because of your bad decision making that that didn't happen. So you are fully responsible for that. But in saying that, London helped me learn so much about myself and my game, that I was able to take those lessons and implement them in Mexico to help me win the world championships. So when people say everything happens for a reason, that was probably one instance in my career which I was like, OK, if I wanted to win the world championships, then maybe I had to sacrifice the bronze medal at the Olympics in order to do so.
BEN WATERWORTH: And I'm sure you take a world championship gold over an Olympic bronze, right?
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, well, to put it into perspective, both I think Lauren Burns and Daniel Trenton only had three fights at the Sydney Olympics to win gold and silver, whereas for the world championships, I had six fights. And everyone in the Taekwondo world sort of gives more street cred to the world championships. It definitely is the pinnacle of our sport, and the world championships are less political. There are many great fighters who should be at the Olympics, which aren't there because of what happens in the Olympic qualification process and their selection process for the Olympics. And also the weight divisions are cut down. So for the world championships, you would have eight weight divisions. For the Olympics, there's only four. And every country can only send two males and two females to compete in their continental championships. If they haven't qualified, top six automatically. That's the only way more countries can qualify more athletes.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's always so interesting learning about these world championships. It's so fascinating. Particularly these sports that you're saying about the weight divisions. We've talked to many athletes who are world champions in an event that they can't be an Olympic champion because they won't have them. I want to quickly ask though, and apologies if I'm going to butcher her name, Nur Tatar from Turkey. She knocks you out in the semis, and then come Rio, she knocks you out in the first round. Is this just like, you just want to kick her even more after this? Or is it like, is it just something else there? Like, I can imagine, like, you're in that unique sport where you're allowed to actually hit a person. So I don't know, does it spur you on more that if you have a fight or against like, come on, stop beating me in the Olympics?
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, definitely. It's tough. And both fights were completely different. I would say that in London, I changed my game plan. So it's almost like that saying, if it's not broken, don't fix it. So I was going really well in London. I'd won my first fight, my second fight, and in my third fight, I started to, instead of just focusing on my own mental state and being really, as I explained earlier in this program, 100% focused, 100% reactive to what was happening and making real life decisions. I started to change my focus to thinking about what she was going to do too much. And then I ended up taking in about four or five different coaching points from people around me, the coach that was there on the day, my coaches in Melbourne, my sister, my partner. And so I had so much going on in my mind that I was trying to do in control in that match that I slipped out of purely being in the moment and just fighting my best fight. So in a sense, I had sort of, even though she's an amazing athlete, and, you know, out brightly, she performed really well, but I felt like I gave her the fight a lot more because I changed my strategy and my approach. When it came to Rio, that whole preparation was so stressful, and this is what's hard as an athlete, people that switch on to the TV and watch it live, they don't see what has happened in the four years before that, how many stresses, personal obstacles, politics that was in there, illnesses you had, injuries you had leading up to it. London, I was in much more better physical form and mental form as well. Rio, there were a lot more personal battles between, I guess, coaches and family members where there was a lot of emotional conflict. And I also had a major tendon injury in my top of my hamstring. So how that affected me was because we were a weight category sport, I couldn't put on the muscle mass that I needed to fight the bigger girls, which was my usual weight division for, say, the World Championships was under 62 kilograms. When I fight the Olympics, I had to fight under 67. So my division gets combined with the weight division above. London, I was weighing about like 65 kilograms. I was able to put on about three, three and a half kilos. For Rio, I weighed 62.6. And I just didn't have that mass because I couldn't be doing those big compound like bulky, heavy lifts of deadlifts and squats to build up that muscle mass because I couldn't put that amount of stress on my hamstring, on my tendon. So I had to balance that out with it being able to kick freely and still be able to do my taekwondo training. But it was still, again, in terms of the strategy, the fight and mentally, we had a better game plan fighting Noor from Turkey the second time around. The scores were 0-0 for the first two rounds, and we focused on shutting down her game. So first three rounds and the start of the third round, it was still 0-0. So at this point, that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to keep the scores very close, 0-0 or 1-1 until the final seconds, and then go for it. That was the game plan. And I had lost my... I had a lapse in my mental focus where I had taken a bit of coaching advice from someone in the stands that was sort of like part of my team, but not my actual coach. And I did a movement which put me closer to... . .put me in the distance of Noor, and then she was able to go for the score. And I did something I wasn't supposed to do that we hadn't been practising. And then from there, she got the first point, and then it just started to cascade. And then I was like, crap, all right, now I'm down, now I have to go for it, and then she just started to pick me off. So that's why you just need that discipline. Sometimes being an athlete is just all about following the rules, being disciplined, focused, maintaining that focus for the full three rounds. But we've got human nature that we're battling against, and sometimes that emotion can come in. Sometimes you make a good decision, sometimes you don't make a good decision, and then it just sort of starts to slip out of your control, and then you leave it more to chance that way. So that's how it happened. Incredible, just hearing that honestly.
BEN WATERWORTH: And I've got to ask, like, just before we let you go, three quick things, just one thing on that.
CARMEN MARTON: Yeah, keep going.
BEN WATERWORTH: Don't obviously want to, like, dwell on, have for Tokyo, but like for what happened with Rio, what happened with the disappointment of Tokyo? Going back to what you're saying about the disappointment of London, which helped you in 2013, can you just bottle all that now Carmen and go, screw it, Paris, I'm gold medal, like this is, I've had so much shit go down since Rio that boom, bring on, bring on Paris. I mean, is that what you're aiming for still to go to another Olympics?
CARMEN MARTON: So I have a few options. I'm taking the time now to really think about everything and assess everything. I would love to, to be honest, I would love to. And I know what that would take. I've definitely got the benefit of having that experience and wisdom. And, you know, if we can change the culture within our sport, I'd love to finish on a high. You know, the last probably four or five years have been really tough, you know, some of the toughest in my career. So I would love to be able to finish in a more positive sense and just enjoy the sport again and be surrounded by good people, people that are empowering you and want the best for you and just have some good fights. Like we had a European tour that we're supposed to go on at the start of 2000, not 2000, 2020. And we only had one competition before COVID started to really skyrocket in Europe, so we had to go back to Australia. And I had done so much work to prepare and I had the eventual gold medallist in the quarterfinal and I was winning that match and it went to Golden Point and she ended up winning the Golden Point and then getting the gold. So I would have loved to at least have done those two opens just to be able to put into practice or just put into work all the hard work that I had done. But we'll see. I will keep you posted.
BEN WATERWORTH: We will keep an eye out. We definitely will. And I'm going to end this on two quick positive things. First of all, I think you're about the third or fourth guest we've had on this show who is on a Woolies Ozzie Heroes sticker. And I'm glad to see that, I think, was it raspberries your favourite fruit? So that's kind of always something there. And I will say, I didn't mention this at the top, but I'm going to end this on this note, you are the 100th guest ever here on Off The Podium. So there's some positivity to take ahead of your tilt for Paris to say that that random podcast I did back in 2021, I was their 100th guest, they can never take that away from me. So world champion and 100th guest on Off The Podium. You are welcome. Put it on your resume.
CARMEN MARTON: That is amazing. I am so impressed. I will take that. I'm all for titles. Thank you so much. And it's been, you know, great being here. You have done a lot of research, which I appreciate. And I hope that what we spoke about here can be valuable. I hope I can come back again one day. I've very much enjoyed my time here.
BEN WATERWORTH: Always welcome back.
CARMEN MARTON: And all the best with your show moving forward. I think that this is a great platform. And if you keep getting to the nitty gritty of it, then Sport in Australia can only keep getting better.
BEN WATERWORTH: And a massive, massive thanks there to Carmen and what an honour to have our 100th guest on Off The Podium, which I'm actually thrilled that we've gotten to 100 guests because we spoke recently when we spoke to Evan Dumphy about he was our first returning guest on the show, and this was sort of a thing that we didn't always know we were going to do, bring on guests on the show. It was kind of like a nice idea, but then we were like, well, do we have the commitment? Is it something that, you know, we can easily access Olympians and ask them to come on the show? And obviously, since Tokyo, we've kind of proved that point that it's been quite a journey to kind of get to our 100th guest. But so, so honoured to be able to chat to anybody on the show and Carmen in particular as well. Such a great, honest, maybe one of our most honest, in-depth chats that we've ever had on the show. So we could we could fill in another couple of hours as she sort of mentioned in there about everything else to do with that, what she was talking about. So really appreciate Carmen's time. And we thank her very much for joining us on the show. Now that we've had a hundred guests, let's go on to a hundred more. We've got more guests coming your way very, very soon on Off The Podium. Stay up to date with what we're going on, of course, via social media, our podcast platforms out there, wherever you can or will listen to podcasts. You will generally find us on there. Search for Off The Podium. Subscribe, go back and listen to our previous 99 guests. And we'd love to hear what you think about the guests, Carmen, our episodes in general. Got any ideas of who you would like us to track down and get on the show by all means, shoot us a message. Or, of course, if you've got any ideas for some other episodes, we've had some fun discussing sports, discussing medals, discussing everything else. We've got some other great ideas to come post-Beijing. We've got some other things that when things slow down a little bit, we've got some potential ideas for future episodes as well. But in the meantime, thanks again to Karma. Thanks again to you for listening. My name is Ben. This is Off the Podium. And as always, Go left!
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