The latest Hong Kong medal contender to take the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games stage, karate exponent Grace Lau Mo-sheung is to finally get her once-in-a-lifetime moment after circling among the world elite for as long as she can remember.
Lau will be making her Olympic debut in what could be the first and last time karate features at a Games. It was one of four non-permanent sports added to Tokyo, with Paris 2024 already confirming it will not make an appearance.
The entire women’s kata event will be concluded in one day, on August 5. Despite spending much of last year stranded in the US, Hong Kong Sports Institute athlete Lau is considered a serious podium prospect.
Equipped with the ability to switch from her bubbly demeanour to being a deadly serious karateka on the mat, here’s what you need to know about the 29-year-old, 1.5 metre (4ft-11in) world No 6 as she tries to realise her lifelong dream of bagging an Olympic medal – and add to fencer Cheung Ka-long and swimmer Siobhan Haughey’s historic achievements.
Biography
Grace Lau Mo-sheung was born on October 19, 1991, to a sporty, admittedly less karatedo-oriented, family. An avid pianist and ballerina, she soon found her calling after watching her older brother in training.
After carving out an unlikely junior career in the Asian kata set-up – Hong Kong’s scene was virtually non-existent, with the sport considered very low in the pecking order – she made her international debut at the world junior and cadet championships aged 20, finishing fifth.
Then began her debut campaign at the inaugural World Karate Federation-run Karate 1 Premier League, now the emergent platform for the world’s best to climb the rankings. It took more than a year for Lau to find her feet before earning her first bronze in 2013.
Collecting a couple more third places, Lau won silver at the Asian Championships in Japan in 2015, then her first Premier League gold in the same month. She won her first World Cup gold by 2016, and has been a perennial medal contender on the circuit ever since. Lau also won joint bronze at the 2018 Asian Games.
In her most impressive feat so far, Lau won bronze at the 2018 world championships – the first time a Hongkonger medalled at the event – before sealing her second Asian Championships silver in 2019.
Just as her form was reaching boiling point, Lau experienced one of the most painstakingly inconvenient halts that any Hong Kong athlete has faced during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Tokyo Games, which she qualified for thanks to her ranking in March of 2020, were postponed for a year.
Lau has won over a dozen Premier League medals, the latest being a silver in Portugal in April – hopefully an indicator that she is peaking at the right time. She has dropped a couple of places in the world rankings after sitting fourth for the better part of two years, though she was recognised at the Hong Kong Sports Stars Awards in April.
Covid-19 hiccups
Lau unexpectedly spent eight months in training camp in Miami, Florida, last year due to travel restrictions, though she insisted the pandemic did not seriously affect her training and goals.
She had left home for a double Premier League outing in Dubai and Salzburg, winning bronze in both, before heading to the US for further training. “I was in [Spain] after Salzburg waiting for the Morocco Premier League to start but it was called off,” said the then world No 4.
“I flew to Miami where I planned to stay until July before flying home to prepare for the Olympics. But the Games were delayed and the pandemic situation showed little improvement,” said Lau, who only returned by the year-end.
After all the Covid-19-related furore, Lau and British coach William Thomas hope the extra year’s double-downing of training and nutrition will align perfectly for Tokyo.
“It will be my only Olympics and, in spite of the Covid-19 situation, I will enjoy it as much as I can. I will do my very best and hope that I can achieve a medal for the Hong Kong team, for Hong Kong karate, for my family, for my friends and for myself,” said Lau, who has been experimenting with the so-called Gyrotonic Method training this year.
“Time flies – 18 months of gathering points to qualify … turned into 30 months due to the postponement of the Games. And now, my dream is going to happen soon.”
Coach Thomas had reportedly already confirmed Olympic Village dietary requirements and travel arrangements well ahead of schedule. “Grace is the full package. They are not going to see the same athlete they saw 12 months ago,” Thomas, a former kumite athlete, told Japan Forward.
“Here in Hong Kong, they’re going to see Grace on television and hopefully everybody can say, ‘oh I want to do that, where can I do that?’ I’m sure that the same story is going to be reflected around the world. Once people see it, it gets that exposure, and for sure I think the participation will increase.”
Dethroning the queen
Karatedo has rather unsurprisingly been dominated by the Japanese. The women’s kata has seen several legends grace the category, but former world No 1 “Kata Empress” Kiyou Shimizu reigns supreme in the modern era.
Given that Shimizu was a two-time world champion and unbeaten since her debut, it was no surprise that Lau’s previous matches with her would end in defeat.
But Lau did the unthinkable at the Karate 1 Series A competition in Salzburg in 2017, wiping out the seven-year unbeaten Shimizu 5-0 to stop a 12th consecutive win. Lau beat her for the second time in a Premier League event in Dubai just months later, showing that the one-invincible queen was human.
“I’m so glad that I could be the first one to beat her,” Lau told the karate federation. “No one is unbeatable. Before beating Shimizu I thought, ‘Do the Japanese always win because they are much better than us or because we make them win?’ The reality is that most of the time we don’t use our best katas against them, so it’s like we allow them to win easily.
“After I beat Shimizu, the trend has changed and now we use the best kata against the Japanese karatekas. We challenge them now that we have the chance to win.
“I just hope that the results I have been getting helps us Hongkongers show that even though we are a small city, we can do well in the sport.”
