Western Australian Institute of Sport Taekwondo athlete Tina Morgan has capped her comeback from a serious knee injury by this morning officially booking her ticket to the 2008 Olympic Games.
Morgan, who also represented Australia at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, was named as a member of the four person Olympic Taekwondo Team at a function at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra this morning. The former World Championship bronze medallist is now the eighth Western Australian athlete to be officiallynamed on the 2008 Australian Olympic Team, joining athletes from the sports of sailing, swimming, shooting and boxing on the team.
The 25-year old suffered a major blow to her plans to contend for a medal in Beijng when shetore her anterior cruciate ligament at a competition in March of 2007 but the Canberra-based fighterunder went radical surgery that invovled a dead person’s patella tendon being transplanted into her knee. Following a lengthy recovery period she returned to competition with a fifth place at the official Olympic Test Event in Beijing in March of this year, starting her steadyrise back to the top of the world taekwondo tree.
In the past three months the WAIS scholarship holder has taken home gold medals from the German Open and the Spanish Open in her preferred under 67kgs division to show she is on track to reclaim her world number one ranking and a place on the podium in Beijing.
A full biography on Tina Morgan is available on the AOC website – http://olympics.com.au/Athletes/TheTeam/tabid/343/Athletes/TheTeam/tabid/344/Default.aspx?cId=20849&teamId=23 while she also writes her own comprehensive blog – http://tinamorgan.blogspot.com/ .
