ANENDRA SINGH
It's always a rarity when someone from the other side of the Bombay Hills strikes a chord with someone in middle earth.
But whatever Olympian Logan Campbell said to a group of Bay City Taekwondo kids the other day, it seems to have worked wonders.
The Hastings club last weekend returned
from the North Island Taekwondo Championship in Tauranga with 29 medals and a trophy to boot.
"We have put up a TV at the dojang here and when Logan fights there'll be no training," club manager and head instructor Camille Pruckmumller told SportToday (Campbell fights between 3pm-5pm today).
Fellow Kiwi featherweight Robin Cheong will start from 1pm and heavyweight Matthew Beach will fight tomorrow from 3pm-5pm.
Pruckmüller (pictured right) said a group of club members had gone to a training session at Campbell's hometown of Tauranga before he jetted off to Beijing.
"He told them he had dreamed of going to the Olympics from the time he was 10 years old and now at 22 he was going to Beijing," she said.
"A lot of my young members are looking at Olympics too."
Pruckmüller said the young martial artists were buoyed by remarks from championship organiser Master Kesi O'Neil, of Mt Maunganui, who coached Campbell to black-belt level before the fighter moved up to Oceania-level coaching in Auckland.
"Master Kesi is always taking teams to overseas and he said some of our youngsters had caught his eye so he'll be holding more training sessions for them either here or there."
The organiser was impressed with the calibre of her members, she said, saying fans didn't have to wait for black-belt fighters to be excited about a bout, like in the old days.
Pruckmumller, who won the trophy at last weekend's championship as the best senior female exponent, said Master Kesi had asked her to stage next year's North Island Championship, but she was going to chew on that because of the enormity of hosting close to 1000 competitors.
