Lutalo Muhammad has a brutally succinct answer when asked what he would do differently if he could go back in time to the final second of the Olympic taekwondo final in Rio. “Duck,” he replies. Instead the 25-year-old from Walthamstow kept his head high and suffered the ultimate sporting sliding-doors moment as his opponent, Cheick Sallah Cissé, landed a flying reverse kick. In an instant Muhammad went from two points up to 8-6 down and the gold medal he had been convinced was his destiny had, by the cruellest of sporting alchemies, turned to silver.
Few will forget the sight of Muhammad afterwards, choking on his tears as he described how he “let people down”. Six months’ distance has given him perspective but the pain still lingers. “I think about what happened in Rio literally all the time,” he says. “It hurts to my core. And it’s something I will never get over.”
What made that defeat even harder to swallow was that Muhammad believed he would win gold ever since watching the first Olympic taekwondo final at the Sydney Games in 2000. “From that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “I even have an A3 piece of paper somewhere with badly drawn Olympic rings on it which says, ‘Olympic champion 2016 by Lutalo, aged nine.’ I had a feeling of destiny and until one second left of the final in Rio everything was going to plan. So to have that snatched away from me literally at the last second was absolutely devastating.”
Should he have not performed the taekwondo equivalent of parking the bus, by moving away from his opponent rather than engaging him? “No,” he insists. “The technique I tried to apply, I did the right thing in the right situation. Ninety nine times out of 100 what happened would never have happened. I never even felt him hit me. I thought I blocked it very comfortably. But it was the longest second in the world. We looked back at it and the referee and the timer weren’t quite in synch unfortunately. I remember thinking ‘Woah, when’s this second going to go?’”
“But it’s important to stress that I have a lot more flashbacks from Rio that are really fun,” he said. “I know I lost in the final but I had the time of my life in Brazil. When I came out for every fight the crowd was screaming and I was interacting with them and even showboating in the early rounds. Going out to perform in front of thousands of people, with hundreds of millions more watching around the world, what’s so bad about that? This is fun, man.”
He concedes his defeat has carried a silver lining. “It is absolutely bizarre. If I had won gold it would have been half a news story for half a day. But winning silver has turned into this incredible journey. I’ve been able to go into schools and talk to kids about making the most of their lives as well as do things like Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Mastermind.” He is particularly delighted to have been nominated for sportsman of the year at the third annual British Ethnic Diversity Sports Awards next month alongside the England rugby player Maro Itoje, the rower Mohamed Sbihi and Sir Mo Farah. “I can’t believe I am in such distinguished company,” he says.
Rather than wallowing over what happened in Rio he is using it as motivation for future successes. “I feel like what happened in 2012, when I got hate mail for being selected for London ahead of Aaron Cook yet won bronze, and then in 2016, is a necessary part of my journey for me to be the man I am today,” he says.
“Life is a journey and there will be bumps. There is no going back. I am a double Olympic medallist and I am very proud of that. And I am also very confident that next time in Tokyo I’ll go and deliver the gold.”
Muhammad has just started training again after a four-month break to prepare for the President’s Cup in April, his first tournament since the Olympics. “I needed that time off,” he says. “Not only to rest physically but to mentally unwind as well. So much passion, emotion and pain goes into an Olympic cycle so you need a break otherwise you might go insane. You can’t be constantly on the grind. You’ll burn yourself out so having time off is healthy.
“I also got to eat lots of food which I never get to eat when I am in full training,” he says, laughing. “I literally ate everything. You name it, I ate it at some point. I’m partial to a bit of Haagen-Dazs but it’s got to be apple crumble and custard. I am a sucker for dessert. It’s horrible because when I am in training I can never really eat dessert. I was at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards, and everyone was saying the same thing, ‘I have been eating so much’ – so it is not just me.”
His main focus for this year is the world championship in June, an event he is convinced he can win. “I have been Commonwealth champion, I have been European champion, I have been grand prix champion, so there’s only world and Olympic golds to win. Great Britain has never had a male world champion but if anyone can do it it’ll be me.”
When he is not training hard, Muhammad likes to read – citing Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons as authors he admires and Catcher in the Rye as his favourite book. “I am a bit geeky,” he says. “And I always try to keep my head in a book, even in between matches, sometimes to keep me calm.
“I tend to like books that are coming-of-age stories – so, when the character starts in one place in their lives and has a problem he manages to solve by the end.” He pauses, then casts his eyes forward to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
“Hopefully that will be mirrored in my life too.”
