Olympic Athlete Who Trained in Fort Lee Arrives in London

Fort Lee doesn’t have any athletes competing in the 2012 Olympics in London, although Taekwondo standout came up just short in her bid, and at 17, is still very much a future Olympic hopeful.

But Pico’s sometime training partner and her coach are in London preparing for the Olympic Taekwondo competition in hopes of bringing home Jamaica’s first-ever medal in the sport.

Kenneth Edwards, 26, is in fact the first athlete from Jamaica ever to qualify for the Olympics in Taekwondo, and with Master Alvin Bernard of on Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee prior to the London Games, which start Friday.

Bernard is also the Taekwondo coach for the Jamaican national and Olympic teams and has been training Edwards since 2007.

“I think he has a desire to do well and to win,” Bernard told Patch in early May. “He’s been travelling and doing all the competitions, all the styles, and once he got into this style—the Olympic style—he liked it a lot, and luckily he found us.”

Bernard trained Edwards in World Taekwon-Do Federation (WTF) style, as opposed to International Taekwon-Do Federation (ITF) style, which he said is completely different and not recognized by the Olympics.

Edwards said qualifying for the London Games was his “biggest moment,” calling it “surreal.”

“If it had not been for this association with Master Bernard, I probably wouldn’t even have been doing WTF,” Edwards said at Team USA Taekwondo Fitness in May.

On Wednesday, Edwards posted on Team USA Taekwondo’s Facebook page that he had arrived at the Olympic village that day.

“The air is spiced with glory and the spirit of competition,” he wrote. “[The] world’s greatest athletes have assembled to display their skills in the field of play for the honor of their flags.”

Edwards went on to write that arriving in London was “the beginning of a dream, the first taste, smell and feel of the pinnacle of greatness for the honor of my country [and] for the honor of all who have shared in this journey in some way.”

Edwards is among 50 athletes from Jamaica, 47 of whom compete in track and field, to qualify for the Olympics, and the contingent from the small Caribbean nation likes its chances of taking home more than the 11 medals Jamaican athletes won in Beijing four years ago, according to a Jamaica Observer report.

A separate report in the same publication reported that team officials are “guardedly optimistic” that Edwards can medal, depending largely on how well he has taken to the WTF style in which Bernard trained him.

Taekwondo doesn’t start until Aug. 8 at the Olympics, with medal events scheduled to take place on Aug. 11.

Edwards, who competes in the men’s +80kg division—or the Olympic equivalent of the heavyweight division—wrote on Facebook that “giving my hundred percent got me here,” and that on Aug. 11, “if there is the possibility of giving my [101 percent],” he would “be doing just that.”