Isabel Sava was nineteen and died on 17 August, in her sleep, of cardiac arrest. The news only became public in recent days. Ambulance crews came to the house and tried to resuscitate her, but could not. British taekwondo is in mourning because it has lost one of its greatest prospects; it is more accurate to say that a family has lost a daughter at an age when nobody thinks about their heart.

She trained in taekwondo from childhood and gave the sport more than a decade. In 2022 she won a silver medal at the World Taekwondo Championship held in the Netherlands. That is not a medal you pick up by accident at nineteen - that is the kind of result after which federations start writing long-term plans around a name. Beyond the black belt, she had reached second dan.

Her relationship with the sport did not stop at competing. Over the years she also began refereeing at various championships, which means she stayed inside it even when she was not fighting. That is a different thing from wanting a medal: it is a person who loves the discipline itself, not just the podium.

Off the mat she was building a second life. She studied law at Queen Mary University of London and was due to start her second year. She wanted to become a lawyer, took part in student societies and contributed to the blog of the legal advice centre. So: training, refereeing, exams and legal practice - all at once, at an age when most people are still choosing a direction.

A friend of her parents started a fundraiser for the funeral costs. That detail says something that does not go into press statements: an athlete with a world medal does not mean a family that can absorb an unexpected blow. The prize money in taekwondo is nothing like tennis or football, and the bills arrive all the same.

Cardiac arrest in her sleep, at nineteen, in an elite-trained athlete. That is a sentence every parent would rather did not exist. And it is a sentence that demolishes sport's most comfortable assumption - that a body which survives ten years of training is the body whose heart needs checking least.