Boxing: Ex-olympic boxer jailed for attacking his mother
A former Olympic boxer who smashed his mother’s collar bone in a midnight attack on her in her own home was today beginning a nine-month jail term.
Nicholas Tooley, who was a member of the British Olympic team to Barcelona, Spain in 1992 shoulder-charged his mother Maria into a wall, Exeter Crown Court was told yesterday.
Prosecutor Gareth Evans said 30-year-old Tooley left his mother with a broken collar bone.
He said Mrs Tooley was in agony after the attack and so frightened of her son that she ran upstairs in her Teignmouth home and locked herself in her bedroom.
She stayed there for over five hours until she rang her daughter asking to be taken to hospital, he said.
Mr Evans said Tooley had been in a perfectly rational mood early in the evening but that all changed around midnight when he started open and shutting the front door repeatedly.
That went on for two hours until Mrs Tooley could stand it no longer and told her son to leave the house.
It was following this that Tooley launched the attack on her, he said.
Defending Rupert Taylor said it was a sad case of a talented young man who had descended in to drug taking and desperately needed help not punishment.
Tooley of no fixed address admitted causing grievous bodily harm to his mother last February.
Jailing him Judge Jeremy Griggs told Tooley: ‘‘You were blessed with a particular talent and have abused that through the use of cocaine.
‘‘If you resort to drug taking when you are released and commit offences of violence, the sentence will be substantial and measured in years.’’
