BOTHELL — Given the choice, Danielle Pelham would be bigger and brawnier, and she’d being doing her hitting on a football field.
“My favorite sport in the whole world is football,” she said. “But I’m 5-3, so that never seemed like a good idea.”
Instead, driven by the same desire for contact, she turned to taekwondo as a youngster. And she was really good right from the start, winning often with a punishing array of kicks and punches.
“I made the other girls cry,” Pelham said.
OK, so she didn’t win many friends in the ring, but she sure won a lot of matches. And she’s still winning, having earned a spot on the U.S. national team for the 2009 World Taekwondo Championships, Oct. 14-18, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“I always expect to do well,” said the 24-year-old Pelham, who lives in Everett. “That’s the difference between an average athlete and an elite athlete. An elite athlete is able to go out and put up the same results over and over again. They’re really consistent with their performances.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s some regional where I’m going to walk through (the competition) or whether it’s the world championships. I’m just going to go do the same things I always do,” she said.
Pelham, who briefly attended Woodinville High School and was then home-schooled after making the U.S. junior national team, will be one of eight American women in Copenhagen. She will compete in the bantamweight class, which is 108-116 pounds.
“I always expect her to fight well,” said her father and coach Dave Pelham, a firefighter for Snohomish County Fire District 1. But with a single-elimination format, he added, “sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw.”
“Would it surprise me if she medaled? No,” he said. “Would it shock me if she went there and lost the first fight? No. Medaling would be huge, but we’ll see.”
Danielle Pelham started in taekwondo when she was 11, and attributes her early interest to a popular TV program at the time. “I watched way too much (Teenage Mutant) Ninja Turtles,” she admitted with a laugh.
At the outset, Dave Pelham said, “I didn’t realize how much she really liked it.” But when Danielle placed first at the 1997 junior nationals nine months after taking up the sport, “I could see this going somewhere,” he said.
“I really, really loved it,” she said. “To be able to throw on gear and just fight was great. I really just fell in love with the competition side of it right away.”
Danielle Pelham won several national titles as a junior competitor, but has yet to do so as a senior (“I have like five silvers,” she said wryly). But she has twice made the U.S. national team, first for the 2005 Pan-Am Taekwondo Championships and again this year for the world championships.
She had hoped to be on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team, but Olympic taekwondo is contested in four weight classes for both men and women, not the usual eight. And Pelham’s weight of 116 was between the 108 and 125 Olympic classes, putting her at a disadvantage if she went up and making it very difficult to go down.
“It was more frustrating than disappointing,” she said. “I was kind of in the middle. It was either fight too low or too high.”
But she rebounded well this spring, going 5-0 at a qualifying event in Austin, Texas, to win a spot on the national team for the bi-annual world championships.
“The Olympics is the big fanfare event,” she said, “but the world championships is really the tournament to go to. It’s really the one that defines a career.”
“The world championships, that’s the ultimate,” agreed her dad. “In the Olympics, given that they combine weight (classes), a lot of the best fighters don’t get to go. But if you make the world championships, you are the best at your weight in the country.
“And if you can medal, then you’re one of the best in the world,” he said.
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