Jamaican fighters ready to defend world titles

Ainsley Walters/Gleaner Writer

JAMAICA’s squad of five fighters and two coaches, Master Claude Chin and Jason McKay, president, International Sports Kickboxing Association Jamaica (ISKA), is in Madrid, Spain, gunning to defend seven gold medals won at last year’s Amateur Members Association World Championships held in Brisbane, Australia.

The November 5-8 tournament is being staged at the Las Olivas Sports Complex in Aranjuez, featuring more than 1,500 fighters from 47 countries and five continents competing in Ring and Tatami sports.

Jamaica have been a dominant force in tatami fighting since McKay first won bronze in the Netherlands in 2011, Akino Lindsay and Richard Stone emerging as two of the championships’ biggest stars with multiple double gold medals in light and semi-contact fighting.’

Though reporting without the team’s most internationally decorated fighter, Nicholas Dusard, McKay is confident that Jamaica can return home with a heavier medal haul than Brisbane 2025 when they won seven gold, three silver, and a bronze.

“In 2019, we went to Cork City in Ireland with a three-man team and bagged five gold, a silver, and a bronze. I am confident that the quality of medals we will win with five fighters in Madrid will outweigh the seven gold, three silver, and bronze won in Brisbane,” McKay pointed out.

Jamaica emerged the most productive participating country in Ireland, averaging two medals per person, including gold in the team-fighting division, which they had also won as hosts in Montego Bay 2018.

Lindsay and Stone lead a crack team completed by Adrian Moore, Nicholai Reid, and Sharic Bowen.

Lindsay, the world’s most decorated ISKA AMA tatami (mat) fighter with an unmatched five consecutive World Championship double-gold in semi and light contact sparring, is a heavy favourite to extend his perennial dominance of the -90kg division.

Recognised by ISKA in 2024 for what was a world record up to 2023, eight consecutive individual gold medals, to which he added four in two years, double gold that year and 2025, Lindsay has ruled the AMA roost with double gold medals in Turkey 2022; Munich, Germany, 2023; Vienna, Austria, 2024; and Brisbane 2025, moving his ISKA AMA gold-medal tally to 13 overall, 12 individual, and one team gold won at home in 2018.

Lindsay first won gold and silver on debut in Portugal 2015, repeating the feat two years later in Greece.

Meanwhile, Stone, who, up to 2023, had threatened to surpass Lindsay in ISKA AMA titles, winning both light- and semi-contact in Munich, Germany, is being drilled at training to regain his light-contact form, having left Austria and Brisbane with bronze medals after winning semi-contact gold medals in the -85kg division.

ISKA Jamaica oversees the sport of kickboxing locally, including sponsorship of various local martial arts championships. The organisation is also the controlling arm of the Jamaica combined martial arts team and sponsors the Jamaican contingent to the annual International Sport Karate Association United States Open in Orlando, Florida, travelling with a combined squad of fighters from the various local martial arts bodies and high school teams.