Dennis Carlo was shaving in the bathroom of his Rancho Santa Fe home when his oldest son, Eric, then five, approached him.
“Dad,” he said, “I want to do karate.”
They had recently watched “The Karate Kid,” so the request wasn’t completely out of left field, but Dennis’s immediate reaction was that his son was too young. The boy, who liked to ride his mini-cycle fast, dropped a checkmate with his response to Dad.
“Well, if I can race motorcycles why can’t I do karate,” the five-year-old shot back.
With that, Dennis enrolled his son at the now-closed Becks’ Taekwondo in Encinitas.
This began the family’s relationship with taekwondo, which has spanned multiple decades and involved all three Carlo sons — Eric, David and Nicholas.
The culmination came on July 4 at the U.S. National Taekwondo Championships in Fort Worth, Texas, when the youngest son, Nicholas, 20, defeated three opponents in a 10-man, round-robin tournament to become a national heavyweight champion of USA Taekwondo.
In his gold medal performance, Nicholas, a black belt in the full-contact heavyweight senior division (ages 17-32), swiftly handled two of his competitors in two rounds each, eliminating the need for a tiebreaker. In the second fight, Nicholas connected on a roundhouse to his opponent’s chest, resulting in a first-round technical knockout.
“This is a really big thing,” Dennis Carlo told The Coast News. “People go their whole lives in taekwondo without becoming a national champion, especially heavyweight. I can’t tell you how proud of Nicholas I am because I know how hard it’s been to get here.”
“It’s not an overnight thing to become a champion,” Nicholas said. “It’s a ton of work. I am working Monday through Friday, sometimes two training sessions a day. It’s a long journey.”
To qualify for the national tournament in Texas, Nicholas won the USA Taekwondo California State Championships in April and the Western Regional Championships the following month in Albuquerque.
Nicholas, 6 feet 4 inches, 220 pounds, started the sport at age six, training at Hyun Kang Taekwondo in Solana Beach while a student at R. Roger Rowe Elementary School. Two years later, Nicholas took bronze in a red belt heavyweight division at the Taekwondo Junior Olympics. At 11, Nicholas won a first-place gold medal in kyorugi — free-form, full-contact sparring — at the World Taekwondo Culture Expo in South Korea.
Since 2011, Nicholas has trained at the Taekwondo Institute in Poway under Grandmaster Hyon Lee, a former member of the U.S. national taekwondo team who competed at the international level, and Master Joseph Lee.
“They [along with my dad] have pushed me to be the best I can and motivated me to always do better,” Nicholas said. “They have helped me when I have doubted myself and maybe wanted to quit.”
Even now, Nicholas experiences the occasional “off day” when motivation is hard to come by. The best antidote he found is movement, which triggers momentum.
“Some days, you don’t want to work,” Nicholas said. “As soon as I can get in motion, you force yourself to stay in motion.”
The Torrey Pines High School grad also does weight training and cardio multiple times weekly at Activ8 Sports Performance Center in Carlsbad.
“Cardio and endurance – it gets really tiring when you are always moving in close and clashing and pushing – that’s something I’ll always need to work on,” Nicholas said. “The more you train the longer you can last and outmaneuver and outfight your opponent.”
“He knows all the techniques,” added Dennis. “As a heavyweight, he can do all the techniques the lightweights can do. I told him he has all the skills, and if his cardio is up there, nobody can beat him.”
In 2012, Nicholas, then an eight-year-old heavyweight, placed third at his first national tournament, the Taekwondo Junior Olympics in Dallas, Texas.
“I’ve been doing this so long and working so hard – the results come after the work,” Nicholas said. “I knew eventually doing the repetitions I’d eventually reach this.”
“I kept telling him, ‘If you never quit and keep working, you will win – never give up,” added Dennis. “One day at lunch with Grandmaster Lee, I asked, ‘Can Nicholas win?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Nicholas can definitely win.’ That was a big thing for me.”
Nicholas’s next goal is to win a world title and compete at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
“I want to work towards that,” Nicholas said. “Team trials are next year, and the collegiate open. I want to travel internationally to get more experience as well.”
Beyond the physical toll that the sport takes, international renown and individual success in taekwondo present financial obstacles as well.
“There is not a lot of money in Taekwondo, unfortunately,” Nicholas said. “All the credit goes to my dad for helping me with that. He’s helping make my dream a reality.”
His father was happy to oblige.
“I am just so proud of my son,” Dennis said.
