Julia Cross

Julia Cross MBE (born 1975) is a Scottish ITF Taekwon-Do legend and one of the most decorated female athletes in the history of the sport. Six world titles. Fifteen European titles. Twice named Overall Best Female Athlete at the World Championships. Three times at the Europeans. She is, without argument, the greatest all-round female competitor the ITF has ever produced. Her path to that status began as a fight for self-confidence. Overweight and bullied at school, she was introduced to Taekwon-Do by her father in January 1986 at age eleven, training under Grandmaster Sheena Sutherland. The sport took hold immediately. In 1989, aged fifteen, she earned her 1st Dan - at that point the youngest female black belt in Great Britain. At seventeen she travelled to Pyongyang, North Korea, for the World Championships and came home with bronze. What makes her record exceptional is its breadth. Most elite ITF competitors specialise in either sparring or patterns. Julia Cross won world titles in both - and in power breaking too. In 1999 in Argentina she won gold in sparring under 58kg, becoming the first British woman in history to be crowned ITF World Champion. Her six world titles span all three disciplines, a combination no other female athlete has matched. A serious hip operation in 2010 ended her competitive career. It did nothing to diminish her impact. She had founded the South Queensferry School of Taekwon-Do in 1998 and continues as head coach, developing Scottish and British talent for the international circuit. In the Queen's Birthday Honours 2020 she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to Taekwon-Do. Having faced depression during her life, she now uses her platform as a sporting legend as an ambassador for See Me Scotland, campaigning against the stigma surrounding mental health - carrying the same directness into that fight that made her unbeatable on the tatami.

Champions are not made in the gym. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision. I was bullied as a child, and Taekwon-Do gave me the armor to face the world.