There are many missing pieces in Ismael Oumarou Ox’s life.
The childhood he never had left him yearning for safety and ultimately led him to taekwondo.
“Growing up in Africa for me was a really tough childhood. From a very young age I was always out there struggling to sell stuff to survive,” he tells Olympics.com.
“I grew up mostly without my mum or dad, mainly with my grandma. As a young boy, I didn’t think much of it or anything.”
He then glances down at the scar on his partially mutilated hand.
The Para taekwondo athlete barely remembers the day his village in rural Niger was attacked by an extremist terrorist group. A grenade was thrown into a pack of children.
Ox, who was just 11 years old at the time, picked it up to hurl it away. The grenade detonated, and his right hand bore the brunt of the explosion, leaving him permanently disabled.
“It’s funny that after I lost my hand, I wanted to do more taekwondo. People would tease me, ‘Oh, you want to fight? You are disabled. You cannot kick nobody with one hand’. I didn’t even know how to do taekwondo well at that time, but I just wanted to keep fighting.”
Then, as a teenager, Ox nearly lost himself on the streets of New York, facing homelessness and hunger.
Yet again, taekwondo gave him stability, purpose, and a path forward, planting more seeds of the resilience that he hopes can carry him to the Paralympic stage at LA 2028.
“It was 2016, that’s when the Olympics became clearer to me,” he recalls, speaking with us from Friedrichshafen, Germany, where he was based for training throughout August.
“There is this guy from Niger who won silver in taekwondo at the Olympics [in Rio], and that’s the year that I knew about the Olympics. That’s when I also said to myself, ‘The next champion in taekwondo from Niger will be me’.”
A toddler escaping violence and his struggle to survive
He is only 22, but Ismael Ox’s story sounds like a script right from a Hollywood thriller. Yet despite everything he has endured for most of his life, he would not change a thing.
Growing up in the Sahel region of West Africa, the native of the capital Niamey spent most of his childhood on the move. Driven from his home to escape violence and poverty. One of 18 siblings, he would find refuge in the rural Diffa region, where his grandmother lived.
“I thought it was normal not to live with your mum or dad. Most of my life I have lived with grandma, from the time I think I was four years old to about seven,” he shared of his earlier years.
“I didn’t like living at home because it was not a safe environment for me. My dad was a violent man. He would always hit me, hit my mum … I would run away. The bad thing is that I grew up thinking it’s normal to hit people.
“Some days I would just go and stay more at the Quran school, but I was hungry, as there’s no food. To survive, I used to sell water or clean people’s bathrooms. Some days I would be lucky to pick some coins as people entered the mosque, where I would mostly sleep. Looking back now, it was a tough childhood, with nobody to guide me, but through it all I always dreamt of changing my life, somehow.”
The dusty, sun-baked earth of his home country forged his grit and resilience. Growing up amid poverty, he learned early that nothing came easy, and he had to battle for everything.
As a boy, Ox would often be drawn into fights until a local taekwondo instructor spotted him, invited him to practice at his dojo, and channel his energy differently.
“I knew taekwondo when I was young. The guy who spotted me said he could see the hunger in me, and he is the one who pushed me to do it. I did for a few months before I got into trouble, and I was kicked out,” he told us.
