She wasn’t aware of her opponent’s big-time title before the match, but was made aware following the match. The Titan Games were billed as The Road to Athens, but Stone and her coaches were kind of thinking more along the lines of The Road to Beijing, considering her age and experience.

Can one big win move the timetable up four years? Let’s get down the road a bit first and then start looking at the map. For right now, let’s talk with Taylor the Titan with the hands of Stone.

Q1: Why are mashed potatoes your favorite food?

TAYLOR STONE: “It’s my comfort food. They’re mushy, creamy, buttery. It feels great. (Gravy?) Gravy’s good … adds a little more flavor, a little more seasoning, if you want to be spontaneous sometimes, go for the gravy.”

Q2: If ever there was a sign of spontaneity, it would be gravy. How cool was it tonight to be in that atmosphere with all the different sports going on?

TAYLOR STONE: “It was different. It was exciting. I just kind of … oooh, cool … gets your nerves going. I felt I was in the spotlight. I was on fire. I was put on the spot and I had to perform and I tried my best. (And it turns out, your best was good enough). Apparently.

Q3: How excited were you to win that match?

TAYLOR STONE: “I was very excited. Someone told me she had some big title; I had no idea until after the fight. Every person is beatable. You just go out there and do what you can. Obviously, I’ve done well in order to get to this point, so I continued what I’ve done, and apparently it works.”

Q4: What did you do tonight that worked?

TAYLOR STONE: “My fast kick, I liked, and my back kick, it worked, but I wasn’t as happy with it. It wasn’t as good as it could have been. It was all right; it worked.”

Q5: Did beating a World Cup champion make you feel more like a Titan?

TAYLOR STONE: Yeah, I mean, why shouldn’t it? Because this is Korea, they’re supposedly suppose to be great. They invented the sport and it feels great to know that I’ve beaten someone who supposed to be trained and lived under this sport. Unlike most people, I don’t get the whole day to train because I’m still in high school. I still have school. I still have friends. I still have other things.

Q6: And you have time to build full-scale replicas of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin ...

TAYLOR STONE: “When I was in third grade, I went to an expeditionary school of learning (in Denver). It was more of an outward bound-kind of connection school. I traveled to Boston to the real house; we were studying Henry David Thoreau and we learned poetry and all kinds of stuff about him and then we built his cabin right on our school campus.

Q7: And then what’d you do, go in there and write some poetry?

TAYLOR STONE: Yeah, it was a reflection place where a lot of the people from the school spent their time. We’d reflect, have sit-down meetings, talk. At playground time, we’d play hide-and-go seek and tag around it.

Q8: What’s an expeditionary school?

TAYLOR STONE: It wasn’t quite as much book learning. We’d do our multiplication, our spelling, a little bit of reading and then we’d have gym class. We’d do rock climbing. We’d travel to different states. We’d do a lot of reflection time. A lot of writing of portfolios, drawing. I was there three years and … then I moved back into a normal public school.

Q9: What about your Outward Bound experience?

TAYLOR STONE: “A couple summers ago I went on an Outward Bound course for a week with 10 other girls near Leadville and I had a blast.”

Q9a: Is it one of those things where they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and they come back and get you in a week?

TAYLOR STONE: “Pretty much.”

Q9b: What did you eat?

TAYLOR STONE: “Roman noodles, dry food, things you could carry in your pack.”

Q9c: Any interesting stories from the week when you were out on your own?

TAYLOR STONE: “Um … interesting stories … ah, yes, half the girls were babies and I had to carry most of their stuff up the hill. Half of them were crying, “I can’t carry it. I don’t have enough room.“

Q9d: You had to go poo-poo in the woods?

TAYLOR STONE: Yes. We had to use leaves, no toilet paper. I’m dead serious. They gave us a demonstration and we were like, ‘Oh my God, no way.’”

Q9e: Do you still do that to this day?

TAYLOR STONE: Definitely not.

Q10: I see in your bio that you like sculpting, so I just have to ask, have you ever done sculpting with mashed potatoes?

TAYLOR STONE: Um, yes. Whenever I get a baked potato, I like to mash it. I can’t have a whole baked potato. I mash it. Put butter in there, chop it up, mash it any way I can. Make it all light and fluffy.

Q10a: But let’s say you already have a big, heaping helping of mashed potatoes, do you make it into a big mashed potato castle?

TAYLOR STONE: No. I make it into a clump, then I put a whole in the middle, put in the butter or the gravy and then I mix it all around.

Q11: Bonus Question: After tonight’s big win, do you feel like you’re on The Road to Athens?

TAYLOR STONE: Yes, I do. If it’s not this Athens, then it’s going to be some other Olympic Games or some other big event. I’m going to be there. I’m going to be around every corner, around every turn. I want to go. Wherever you want to send me, I’ll go.