Chelsea (Stone) Mazzei is one of the most successful taekwondo competitors the province has ever seen. She won 19 consecutive national championships in her weight class in sparring and was a member of the national team from 2000-17. She maintained this high level of excellence despite having some serious injuries over her lengthy career.
She got her start in Regina taekwondo at Regina West Zone Taekwondo, under the supervision of Grand Master Clint Norman, an SSHF inductee. By the time she was 12 she was training five days per week at two clubs in Regina. Stone made her international debut at junior worlds at the age of 15 in North Korea – a unique and memorable experience that saw her captain the junior national team and finish fifth in sparring.
In 2002, she was named the Sask Sport Youth Female Athlete of the Year and the Canadian Taekwon-do Federation International’s Athlete of the Year after another strong showing at junior worlds. She won a silver and a bronze medal in individual competition and was part of two bronze medal-winning teams. That same year she competed in junior and open competitions at nationals and won six medals – four of them gold. She won both the junior female and the women’s black belt sparring competitions to qualify for her first International Taekwon-do Federation’s (ITF) World Senior Championships.
Stone qualified for the ITF World Championship nine times and attended the World Cup six times. She served as the captain of a national team at five international competitions. At the ITF World Championships, she won a bronze medal in her class twice in women’s black belt sparring – once in 2009 and again in 2017.
The second world bronze medal was even more significant given that it came months after she needed surgery to repair a broken forearm. Stone suffered the injury at nationals when she broke her arm during the power breaking competition. She successfully broke the board, but her follow-through struck the machine that holds the boards in place. With her arm quite visibly broken, Stone competed in three straight rounds of sparring and successfully kept her streak of national sparring titles intact. Her training suffered during her recovery, but she won the only sparring medal for Canada at that year’s ITF Worlds in Dublin.
In her six World Cup appearances – which are held in years without a world championship – she won the women’s black belt sparring gold medal and a silver medal in patterns in 2004. She won a bronze in Sparring in 2014. She won the Top Female Black Belt Award at the 2012 Pan-American Championships. She competed at five Pan-American championships in total and won three golds, two silvers and a bronze medal in individual competition and added three golds and a bronze medal as a junior competitor at the Pan-Ams.
She became the first female coach on the ITF national team in 2015. At the time of her induction, she was a sixth-dan black belt and teaches at her own club, Buffalo Plains Taekwon-do, in Balgonie where she has been the head instructor since 2013.
Installed in the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame on September 28, 2024.
