Ayesha Ayaz, a student of class 4 from Swat in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, has become Pakistan’s youngest female athlete to win a gold medal in Taekwondo. The nine-year-old won her latest laurels in the sport at Dubai’s 8th Fujairah Open Taekwondo Championship.
Ayesha has been practicing the Korean martial art since the age of 3 – having already won multiple titles at the district and provincial levels. She has been a national-level Taekwondo champion three times now.
Swat’s Taekwondo prodigy comes from a family of practitioners of the sport. Her two younger brothers Zaryab and Zaib Khan have each won honours up to the national level. Her father, Ayaz Naik, is himself a Taekwondo practitioner and teacher, who runs his own academy that imparts training in the martial art.