Stacey Hymer

At age four, Stacey Hymer’s junior sporting career began rather similarly to any other Australian youth around the nation, through her family. Encouragement from her brother and father to adopt a traditional taekwondo regime focused on poomsae and self-defence was the basis for her genesis in the sport.

Stacey lived a typical sports-crazed Australian childhood, balancing taekwondo commitments with a successful amateur football, softball, and athletics career.

Stacey’s passion for martial arts was first channelled upon her move to a sparring-focused club, where performances on the national stage gifted the Melbourne native opportunities to further her skills and experience against stronger opposition.

A gold medal at the 2016 national championships began Stacey’s ascension through the ranks of Australian taekwondo. The following two years saw Stacey travel to Canada and Tahiti, where she took out silver and gold in the Presidents Cup and Oceania Championship, respectively, to firmly establish herself at the apex of the women’s featherweight arena.

Stacey was handpicked by Australian Taekwondo to train at the high-performance hub, under national coaching director Karim Dighou upon the facility’s opening in 2018. At the hub, Stacey undertakes 4-5 technical sessions a week, as well as regular strength and conditioning sessions.

Continued training at the South Melbourne-based hub precipitated encouraging performances at the 2019 World Championships and the Australian Open, where Stacey’s focus began to shift to an inaugural Olympic campaign in Tokyo.

Stacey’s Olympic fate was sealed in March of 2020, when the featherweight cruised past Samoan Cecilia Theresa Vili Magele on the Gold Coast to join Reba Stewart as the two qualified female athletes in the sport.

Following the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, Stacey remained committed to furthering the growth of martial arts within Australia, with the athlete hosting skill sessions for junior taekwondo clubs and fundraising for those suffering from mental illness throughout the nation.

Stacey made her Olympic debut in 2021 and was defeated in the round of 16, losing to Canadian Skylar Park 25-15.

After winning a gold medal at the Australian National Championships in 2023, Stacey has criss-crossed the world to compete at as many competitions as possible, to improve her ranking position and gain more experience ahead of the Paris Olympics.

Her 2023 results included gold at the Australia Presidents Cup, silver at the Australia Open, silver at the Kimunyong Cup in South Korea, bronze at the Korea Open, ninth place at the China Grand Prix and gold at the Pacific Games in the Solomon Islands.

All that experience will be put into practice once she gets to Paris.

“If anything, the Olympic experience has given me the motivation and drive to keep training hard and put all that knowledge from competing fighters at the elite level on the mats to give myself the best opportunity for Paris 2024,” she said.

Stacey, who describes herself as a “massive foodie”, has completed a food technology and nutrition degree at RMIT University.