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Elyassi dominates any sport she picksDate: 07.02.2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team
Churchill High grad takes on professional bodybuilding
Picture this: a former state and national taekwondo champion, who at one point doubled as one of the top amateur boxers in the world. Also an aspiring professional bodybuilder, the Churchill High graduate’s freakish strength includes a 350-pound bench press and a 1,400-pound leg press.The Incredible Hulk? Superman?
Nope. For starters, she’s a she.
Meet Kina Elyassi, a true jack-of-all-trades who’s refused to let her already-staggering athletic career fade away, even in her mid-30s. After giving birth to her second child just 20 months ago, Elyassi has her sights set on conquering her third sport, logging massive hours in the weight room in preparation for the 2007 NPC Natural East Coast Tournament of Champions bodybuilding tournament this June.
Though she has no competitive experience, she has already showcased her potential in her relatively primitive stages of preparation.
‘‘As far as weights are concerned, Kina has the most incredible strength — as a woman, more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, and it’s not even close,” said Cyp Wilfred, Elyassi’s trainer at Fitness First in Rockville. ‘‘I’ve had some very good athletes that I’ve worked with in the past, but she stands beyond everyone else. Kina’s not an Amazon-looking individual, like people think of bodybuilders, but when you see her in the weight room, it’s something you see and go ‘Oh my God, this is not happening.’”
That’s considerable praise coming from someone who has trained bodybuilders for the last 12 years. But it just reinforces the obvious — Elyassi is a rare specimen. It’s not enough for her to simply dabble in a sport — she doesn’t stop until she’s the best.
Like most great athletes, her competitive fire can be traced to her adolescence. Elyassi grew up in Iran under the parenting of father Mahmoud, who served as the chief bodyguard to King Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi before and during the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s.
A seventh-degree black belt of his own, Mahmoud Elyassi was dying to bestow some of his talents upon his offspring, which included six girls. So he handpicked Kina, and after moving with the family to the U.S., placed his daughter in assorted martial arts classes at the tender age of 6.
From a young age, she was no ordinary girl.
‘‘Here’s my sisters playing with Barbie dolls, and I’m playing with Tonka trucks and G.I. Joe,” said Elyassi, whose family moved to Rockville from California prior to her high school years. ‘‘But it was always very natural to me.”
By the time she was a teenager, Elyassi had already garnered lofty ambitions for her martial arts future. In 1988, she got word that Tae Kwon Do would become an Olympic sport for the first time, and began her quest for the Summer Games in Seoul, Korea.
She appeared well on her way, after already winning state and national Tae Kwon Do events in her young career. In fact, she was one of five athletes selected to train in Seoul, but during a preliminary match, Elyassi badly injured her kneecap while receiving an elbow block, erasing her chances of competing in the Olympics. She did make the ‘‘B” team.
That didn’t take away the competitive juices, however. Elyassi wanted a new challenge, and a new combat style. So she turned to boxing, a sport that required none of the kicking abilities from her former sport, but twice the punching power.
At the very least, it helped take away some of the sting of her prior misfortune.
‘‘It took awhile to get over [the injury] — you kind of feel like your whole dreams are gone,” she said. ‘‘At that time, I felt like I’d accomplished everything else I could in taekwondo, so I needed a new challenge. I felt boxing was very challenging and a new sport for women. All the focus for the sport used to be on men, so I wanted to show that women can do everything a man could do.”
From the get-go, she appeared a natural. Upon walking into the boxing ring for the first time, she was picked out by former 1976 Olympic Silver Medalist Charles Mooney to be her protégé. In Elyassi, he saw a boxer who ‘‘had the fastest jab he’d ever seen” earning her the nickname, ‘‘Rocket.”
By 1992, she had fulfilled much of her vast potential, at one point earning the No. 3 amateur ranking in the U.S. for the 112-pound flyweight division. More importantly, the Olympic committee began heavy talk of including women’s boxing as a sport for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona.
It was the only thing keeping Elyassi from turning professional. But the talks never materialized into results.
‘‘When I found out the Olympic committee didn’t approve it — I was disappointed, of course,” she said. ‘‘But the love I have for any combat sport, I stayed in it. Actually, I’m still doing boxing a couple times a week.”
She also maintains her attachment to taekwondo, teaching the oldest of her two boys (age 11) as well as several other students at Washington Episcopal School.
It is just one of Elyassi’s many endeavors in her hectic lifestyle. A 1998 graduate of Georgetown University with a degree in International Business, she runs a successful interior construction business called Omni Construction and even occasionally contributes articles to various sports publications, such as Women Boxing Archive Network. This summer, she also plans to open a non-profit community fitness center to promote youth fitness programs and women’s self-defense classes, as well as a creating a drug-free environment.
But the majority of her thoughts right now are focused on four months from now, when she will put her body in front of several judges at the University of the District of Columbia auditorium. She’s set to begin a 16-week diet plan under Wilfred’s watch in preparation for the event, and he, for one, can’t wait to see the finished product.
‘‘To see how far she’s come — when she came to me a little over a year ago, we had to take her baby weight off,” Wilfred said. ‘‘And now she just looks great. She comes from an athletic background, so her body remembers what it’s like under stress, and she has so much concentration. It’s almost scary to see a woman with the ability to train like this.”
But in Kina Elyassi’s life, that’s just par for the course.
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