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If you haven’t yet heard of Caden Cunningham yet, there’s a good chance you will have by the end of these Olympics.
Cunningham is square-jawed with sunken brown eyes under a fuzz of hair; wide shoulders and a pristine posture, standing 6ft-plenty. He’s a part-time model – GQ magazine recently dubbed him “an Olympic prince (and a menswear king)” – a full-time Taekwondo champion, and he loves the stage.
Cunningham is only 21 but has already won a string of medals and became the European heavyweight champion in May. He arrives in Paris this week as a serious contender for gold, armed with a self-assurance that practically kicks you in the face. “Regardless of whether I win or lose [in Paris],” he says, “I’m confident I could go for the next four years and really pick up speed in Taekwondo and conquer this heavyweight division. I am starting to do it now.”
As a child growing up in Huddersfield, Cunningham always wanted to be a sports star, not as a fanciful dream but as an unwavering career goal. He first tried Taekwondo at six years old, inspired by his dad who competed in martial arts, and aged 10, while doing press-ups and planks at home each evening, they mapped out his Olympic debut.
“I wanted to move over to kickboxing but that isn’t in the Olympics, so when we looked at it we thought, no, let’s stick with Taekwondo. Me and my dad worked out that by Paris, that’s when I’d be old enough to compete. That’s when I decided, I trained every single second I could.”
His dad would encourage him to take on bigger, “scary” fighters and Cunningham would get “beaten up”, he admits, but the physical deficit forced him to learn the skills to make up the difference.
“I was very lucky to be so self-motivated for the sport, so it made it that much easier to get the techniques down because I just wanted to be the best at them.” He stepped up to the heavyweight division before he was ready but quickly developed into a versatile fighter who could adapt to more powerful opponents.
Cunningham’s rapid rise is made all the more remarkable because he lost six months to injury. In his first fight of the 2022 World Championships, he felt the anterior cruciate ligament snap in his knee. He won the contest with his leg in pieces before losing in the next round.
“It never changed my path to Paris, for me,” he says. “In theory, it made it quite difficult but I never saw it as a big threat. I just thought, this is going to make it a cooler story when I do go. I really knuckled down. I saw it as an opportunity to grow and come back an absolute monster. And that’s what I did.
“It taught me about myself as a person, it taught me patience, how to really optimise my body in training because anything I did with that leg really fatigued me. It was a blessing.”
He has been utterly dedicated ever since, training six days a week, but he has still found time to branch out into the world of fashion. After signing with management agency Forte, Cunningham has been the focus of editorials in Tank and CircleZeroEight as well as GQ, and he was snapped up by Adidas before the Olympics.
“My mum absolutely loves it, she always said when I was young, ‘you should be a model Caden’,” he laughs.
His first shoot was terrifying. “You wouldn’t believe how nervous I was. The key was pretending you know what you’re doing. As soon as I started acting like I’ve done it 100 times then everything started flowing a lot more natural. I’m much more comfortable with it now.”
Perhaps the surest sign of Cunningham’s impenetrable confidence is that a third career is already in his mind. He is a fan of mixed martial arts and admires the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a far more violent and lucrative world than Taekwondo. So after a decade spent planning for Paris, perhaps it is no surprise that Cunningham can already visualise his next move.
“The way the UFC is going, I just think it looks amazing. I enjoy fighting and MMA is very raw, you can really get stuck in there. But that’s something to see when I’ve got my Olympic gold.”
