The Paris Summer Olympics may be just around the corner, but one sport from the 2020 Games will be notably absent. That’s where Kamran and Kelara Mandani come in.
For the past 34 years, the Mandani family has run the International Martialarts Association karate school off of Main Street in Louisville, and co-owner Kamran — who graduated from Broomfield High School in 2014 — had the chance to represent Team USA as an alternate the last go-round in Tokyo.
He didn’t get the chance to compete, but he now serves as a coach and sports psychologist within the Team USA program. Throughout his 15-year career, he racked up 19 gold and silver medals from a wide variety of tournaments, including the Junior Olympics, the Pan American Games, the University World Championships and the U.S. Open.
Now, he gets in the athletes’ heads for a living.
“The majority, the vast majority of everything we do is mental,” Kamran explained. “How you wake up in the morning really affects how you’re going to approach a combat sport, let alone physical exertion. You’re actually taking blows, and then trying to deliver them as well.”
He and his 24-year-old sister, Kelara, recently took over the family business and now coach and train kids from all over Boulder County and beyond. One of their protégés, 22-year-old CU student Emre Kivanc, moved to Colorado six years ago to train with IMA.
He first met Kamran on a USA National Team trip, and he qualified for the senior national team for the first time in 2023.
“The quality of training with Kamran as my coach and having these camps, people are always coming in and out,” Kivanc said. “It’s really great. I always have something new to work on, something new to fix.”
A couple of weeks ago, the Mandanis and IMA hosted a high-level training camp that featured U.S. National Team members and national team members from a few other countries. They wanted to give the athletes the elite-level experience outside of national and international competitions.
Kamran served as the only coach at the clinic and Kelara was one of the many faces of well-accomplished athletes in the room. She, likewise, has won “too many medals to count” over the years but takes the most pride in finishing fifth at the Pan American Games.
“It was rough, but that was honestly the best experience I’ve ever had,” she said. “It made me feel like the top, elite level athlete that I can be. It was more the experience of being on TV, thousands and thousands of people watching you and just getting to go to a Games.”
They hope that come 2028, karate will once again make its way back into the senior Olympic sphere, especially considering the Games will be held in Los Angeles.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, we’ll just stay positive,’ and whatever,” Kelara said. “A big thing is the Games are going to be in America, so anything that we can do to help push for karate in the Olympics, we’ll do it. There have been some people advocating and showing why it should be, and karate really is such a big sport in the world. It’s not that big in America, unfortunately, but worldwide, there are so many countries that practice our karate or some form of martial arts.”
