National karate championship in St. John's a 'fantastic success' for associations, athletes alike

For the first time in 16 years, Newfoundland and Labrador hosted the national championships in karate over the long weekend.

The event brought between 500 and 600 athletes from across the country as well as over 2,000 spectators and officials to the Mary Brown's Centre in St. John's.

The event was a success for Karate Newfoundland and Labrador, says president and coach Nathaniel Besso.

Besso believes hosting a championship is an important step for the province to instill the passion for the sport in future generations of karate athletes, so-called karatekas.

"The young and the next generation athletes seeing this is probably the biggest goal of mine," said Besso.

"I myself was on the national team for the past six to seven years. So this was a big goal to bring this home and share the high-level karate that we have in this country."

Besso says karate has come a long way in the province, with many national champions since 2012.

"Since that point, we've been really accelerating our high-performance programs here and really putting a lot more funding toward developing our athletes, developing our coaches and officials," said Besso.

Besso calls his team's performance "excellent" considering its small size compared to other provinces, as it won one gold, one silver and two bronze medals.

Emily Reglar snatched gold for the province, and Faith Collier won bronze.

Reglar and Collier agree it's important to host championships to promote karate in the province.

"[It brings] a lot of awareness to karate and … it was done terrifically," said Reglar.

"Especially since COVID kind of took away our last two years," Collier added.

"It's been really nice just to be here and to be able to get this experience of having nationals on our home