Shipman qualifies
Plantation native has qualified for Olympics, but that’s just the start
Plantation resident Aliyah Shipman’s eyes lock and widen, staring straight ahead. The 17-year-old Olympic qualifier lifts her leg, neutralizing the prop mimicking a would-be opponent, and suspending her leg in midair. Then, after a momentary hesitation, she elevates her foot, thrashing it violently at a punching bag above her trainer’s shoulder.
“Be careful of my head,” her taekwondo trainer, Mohammed Ali Melgagh — no relation to the boxing legend — tells her as they train in a Sunrise gym.
She does it again.
“I told you, my head.”
Ali sometimes goes home, gets into bed and tries to fall asleep, only to realize he’s concussed. “It happens all the time,” he says, with a smile that would confound most anybody else.
Even in a made-for-camera impromptu workout, Shipman locks in, keeping her focus set as she spars her younger brother, Albert, a rising tae kwon do talent himself. Focus is paramount in the life of Aliyah Shipman, an aspiring doctor in her postOlympic life. Those words alone can be a mouthful, but to strive for them comes with its fair share of trade-offs. Like fourhour nights of sleep. Like six, sometimes seven days a week in the training gym. Like global travel all throughout the year.
“I just manage to get everything done because I want both,” Shipman said. “I want to do well in school and do well in tae
kwon do.”
It’s been more than three months now since Shipman won two fights at the Pan American Olympic Qualifier to book her ticket to Tokyo with Team Haiti, and almost as long since the games were postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now, as Shipman sees it, she’s been gifted a year to train and improve before the moment of her life. That hardly seems the time to lose focus.
“I picture [the Olympics], and I try to keep myself calm because that’s the best way to win,” Shipman said. “You just have to stay calm. I picture all these lights and these cameras, but I’m like, also, ‘You have to stay calm.’ ”
It’s funny, then, how one innocuous decision eight years earlier ended up charting this course. When Shipman was a chubby 9-year-old kid, her mother sought to get her into a physical sport. One of her classmates did karate, so she thought that would be fun. But the local tae kwon do gym was closer.
“My mom’s like, ‘karate and tae kwon do, it’s like the same thing,’ ” Shipman said. “That’s how I started tae kwon do.”
She instantly fell in love it, mostly with the feeling of winning. At age 14, she started training with Melgagh, who spent eight years competing with Team Morocco from 2004-12, before coming to Florida and opening his martial arts and fitness center I-Fight in Sunrise.
It didn’t take long for him to see her potential.
“Since I trained her the first time, I saw
how determined she was,” he said. “She had talent. She was tall, flexible, smart. She has every technique. Plus, what I like about her — it’s her mentality. She was very determined. I found a champion inside the personality.”
As Shipman progressed through the youth ranks, those within the global tae kwon do community took notice.
In the middle of 2019, the Haitian coach invited Shipman to fight for their team. Melgagh knew the opportunity that provided Shipman, who would have a more plausible path to the Olympics through that route. Shipman, the daughter of an Indian mother and an American father, holds no Haitian roots. But in tae kwon do, a sport with very limited Olympic spots, that’s a relatively common affair, as coaches scout talent elsewhere to represent their nation. Despite her age, Haiti couldn’t ignore Shipman’s talent.
“I told her, ‘If you don’t jump on this right now, it’s going to be like a big race, a very long race for you,’ ” Melgagh said. “She followed what I said. I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s jump on it. Let’s just do it. I know you’re young, but it’s worth a try.’ ”
Still, even after accepting, there was reason to be skeptical Shipman would qualify in 2020. At the time they approached her, Shipman wasn’t even old enough to compete at the senior level, which included athletes as old as their early-30s; both she and Melgagh knew the small window between her 17th birthday in January and Olympic qualifying in March would be crucial.
As a test, Melgagh sent Shipman to the Turkish Open during the first week in March, harboring little expectation that Shipman, the youngest person in the field, could compete.
“Most of the athletes when they change from juniors to seniors, they get beat up badly,” Melgagh said. “They don’t have experience in seniors, senior level is very tough. They go there. They lose badly.”
But Shipman held her own. She won the bronze medal in Turkey, beating national team representatives from all over the globe, then won the Bronze at the U.S. Open shortly after.
“I was like, ‘She’s got it. She has it.’ We kept on training, training, training until qualification.”
Which set the stage for the qualifying event on March 13, needing to win just two fights to get to Tokyo. Once she won the first, the prize was in sight.
“Once it came time to fight that second fight, I was so close to my goal, I just wanted to snatch my dream,” Shipman said. “It was the most amazing moment of my life.”
For a normal 17-year-old, dubbing anything the best moment of their lives might seem a tad hyperbolic. But normal 17-year-olds aren’t timing their drive-thru high school graduations with practice sessions, nor sifting through freshman year college courses to best accommodate Olympic training schedules. They’re not planning college lives with more days off campus than on. And they usually don’t spend a year pondering the granular details of their impending appearance at the Olympics.
As of now, Shipman is the youngest tae kwon do Olympian in the field and the lone representative of Haiti. She’ll spend the next year aiming to medal because, well, why not?
“For me, I just think if I work hard enough, it doesn’t matter if they’re older than me,” she said. “I can beat them if I just try.”