Tag: judo

Olympic sports writing: 2004-2015

Selected features and interviews, plus coverage from several Olympics:

Features

Sochi 2014

London 2012 (all Bleacher Report unless noted)

Vancouver 2010: Nordic sports and biathlon (all USA TODAY)

Beijing 2008: Everything, especially soccer (all USA TODAY)

Torino 2006 (USA TODAY)

Athlete interviews (all USA TODAY)

I’m back – what’d I miss?

My hand is out of a splint after three weeks, though my typing speed is still diminished by a bit of tape on my two still-aching fingers. I may need to put my goalkeeping career on hold for a while.

I’m also relatively not sick. I have no idea how I’ve had waves of sinus and throat problems through the most mild summer of my lifetime, but a doctor has assured me she’ll figure it out. I got back from vacation to find Northern Virginia had become a sauna to start September, and after leading a couple of youth soccer practices in Venusian conditions last night and walking a couple of miles this morning, I actually feel better. Go figure.

Enough complaining. I’m back, and it’s time to give a quick update on the blog, my writing priorities over the next few months, and what happened in the sports world while I was healing.

The blog: Expect more links and fewer 1,000-word pieces. I want to keep sharing Olympic sports news, but I’m going to do that more efficiently. No more Monday Myriad (in part because my youth soccer practices are on Mondays), so this will be the last “roundup” post for a while. My analysis will more commonly be on …

The podcast: Hoping to do another one this week, depending on my guest’s schedule.

Medal projections: By next year, I hope Olympic sports news will be in the context of my medal projections. I’ll be working on that, along with …

Enduring Spirit epilogue: The tentative plan is to re-release the book (electronically only) with the epilogue added. I’ll also release the epilogue separately at a low, low price, so if you already bought the book, you won’t be shelling out another six bucks. I’m going to do a few postseason interviews, so don’t expect this right away.

Single-Digit Soccer: This project keeps gathering momentum. I’m planning to speak and gather input at the NSCAA convention in January, and I hope to finish it by next summer.

Other than that, I’ll still be writing at OZY, a site you should check out even if you never read anything I write. And you may still see an MMA book I finished a while back.

—

So what happened while I was out? In no particular order:

Badminton World Championships: South Korea wins men’s doubles, China won three other events, and the women’s singles went to … Spain? First time for everything, and this is a terrific photo:

Judo World Championships: Olympic champion Kayla Harrison was the only U.S. medalist, taking bronze.

Rowing World Championships: Britain won 10 medals, New Zealand won nine, Australia and Germany eight each, and the USA won seven. The World Championships include a lot of non-Olympic events, so don’t use this for medal projections. These championships included some para-rowing events, which accounted for one U.S. medal. The sole U.S. gold went to, as always, the mighty women’s eight.

World Equestrian Games: The sole U.S. medals so far are in the non-Olympic discipline of reining. Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are cleaning up. Olympic quota spots (earned by the country, not the athlete) are available in dressage, eventing and show jumping.

Also, Ollie Williams (the man behind Frontier Sports) looks at the Olympic prospects of horseball. Yes, horseball. They compare it to a mix of rugby and basketball, but I think it’s a mix of polo and quidditch.

Triathlon, World Series grand final: Gwen Jorgensen didn’t need a great finish to clinch the world championship. She did it anyway. Too early to declare her athlete of the year?

Swimming, Pan-Pacific Games: Phelps, Ledecky and company have it easy compared to Haley Anderson, who won open-water gold after a jellyfish sting, a race postponement and a race relocation. 

Track and field, Diamond League finals: Half of the events wrapped for the season at the Weltklasse Zurich over the weekend; the rest finish up Friday in Brussels. Check the Monday Morning Run for a recap that includes fellow Dukie Shannon Rowbury diving along with U.S. teammate Jenny Simpson as the latter took the women’s 1,500 title in style.

Today’s Frontier Sports wrap has a couple of track and field links (along with helpful links on badminton and much more), including “the often-told, never-dull tale of how (Brianne Theisen-Eaton) almost impaled (Ashton Eaton) with a javelin.”

Overall Diamond League winners include Simpson, Michael Tinsley (USA, 400 hurdles), Christian Taylor (USA, triple jump, took title away from teammate Will Claye at final), Lashawn Merritt (USA, 400 meters, Kirani James wasn’t at the final), Reese Hoffa (USA, shot put), Veronica Campbell-Brown (Jamaica, 100), Dawn Harper-Nelson (USA, 100 hurdles — Americans won every Diamond League race), Tiana Bartoletta (USA, long jump) and Valerie Evans (New Zealand, shot put, swept).

Women’s soccer, NWSL final: I got back from vacation to see this, and I’m glad I did. It was a compelling final, and while Seattle would’ve been a worthy champion in every sense, Kansas City deserved it. The Lauren Holiday-to-Amy Rodriguez combo is as potent as anything you’ll see in soccer.

Kansas City now holds the top-division U.S./Canada titles in men’s soccer (Sporting KC, MLS), women’s soccer (FCKC), and men’s indoor soccer (Missouri Comets, coached by FCKC’s Vlatko Andonovski). The latter won the last MISL title before most of that league leapt to the MASL.

The league also announced it would play a full schedule next summer with a break for the World Cup, which means international players will miss a considerable number of games. The big worry: The season will spill into September, bad news for those counting on international loans or fall coaching jobs to supplement the league’s small paychecks. But the league didn’t have a lot of good options, and now they’re poised to ride a World Cup wave if one materializes again.

Basketball World Cup: Senegal over Croatia is the big upset so far, while France, Brazil and Serbia have created a logjam for second behind Spain in Group A. The USA is cruising through an easy group.

Men’s volleyball World Championships: Many people are watching.

The USA won a thrilling five-setter and lost an epic to Iran in early group play.

Modern pentathlon World Championships: Underway with relays.

MMA: The UFC 177 pay-per-view card had already been hit by a rash of injuries. Then one of the UFC’s most heralded recent signings, Olympic wrestling gold medalist Henry Cejudo, had a “medical issue” while trying to make weight. Then former bantamweight champion Renan Barao, set for a rematch against new champ T.J. Dillashaw, also couldn’t make weight. Joe Soto got the Seth Petruzelli-style bump from the undercard to the main event. Unlike Petruzelli against Kimbo Slice, Soto couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity.

So the most noteworthy things about the card, apart from Cejudo and Barao’s weight-cutting issues, were:

1. Bethe Correia taking out another of Ronda Rousey’s buddies, veteran Shayna Baszler. Now Rousey wants a piece of Correia, who’ll be happy to oblige.

2. Dana White launching an unholy rip of the media. Some days, I miss covering this sport — this would’ve been fun.

Overseas in ONE FC — I’m absolutely biased toward Kamal Shalorus, who works in our wonderful local dojo and is as nice as he could be. Glad to see him get a title shot, but Shinya Aoki was always going to be a tough matchup, and Aoki indeed kept the belt.

Chess: World champ Magnus Carlsen and top U.S. player Hikaru Nakamura are at the Sinquefield Cup, but Italy’s Fabiano Caruana has left them in the dust, beating Carlsen, Nakamura and the other three to go a perfect 5-for-5 halfway through the double round-robin.

And we’re a month away from Millionaire Chess. Ignore the monetary losses and enjoy.

Cycling: Vuelta a Espana in brief — Nairo Quintana fell, Alberto Contador took the lead.

Video games: A terrific glitch in Madden ’15 — a 14-inch-tall linebacker:

Coming up: Bloody Elbow is looking at the upcoming wrestling World Championships.

Glad to be back!

Woly Award: Marti Malloy, judo

We’re not just invoking Ronda Rousey’s name for search traffic. Marti Malloy has a couple of similarities to the brash UFC champion — an Olympic judo medal among them.

Now Malloy also has a gold medal from the first Grand Prix held on U.S. soil (Miami). She clinched the title with Rousey’s favorite technique, an armbar:

(Her fight starts around the 2:49 mark. If you’re really impatient, skip from there to the last 30 seconds of the bout.)

Malloy is this week’s winner of the Woly Award, which SportsMyriad gives to the top U.S. Olympic sports athlete of the week.

The rest of the week included:

Soccer: Most of the SportsMyriad readership is surely aware that the U.S. women beat South Korea 4-1, and that Abby Wambach scored her 156th career goal.

Volleyball: Two wins for the U.S. men over France in World League play, plus a Pan American Cup gold medal for the U.S. women.

BMX: Arielle Martin finished second in a World Cup stop, while Connor Fields and Alise Post medaled in the time trials.

2012 medal projection update: Judo

Quick aside to MMA fans: We’re probably not looking for the next Ronda Rousey here. Not many people are that good at landing the armbar and marketing themselves. But maybe the next Rick Hawn? Dude’s doing pretty well in Bellator.

In any case, the USA has someone who can do even better than Rousey in Olympic judo — Kayla Harrison, the 2010 world champion.

Check out the previous picks and some rankings — the Olympic qualification rankings and the overlapping current world rankings, which will tell you the World Championship results in very small type. Or you could just check the World Championship results in a separate window.

Now see if you can figure out who actually made the teams. Countries with more than one qualifier had to pick one somehow. In the process of trying to figure it out, I stumbled into a great not-quite-safe-for-work Uncyclopedia entry that explains the brutality of judo: “You are never unarmed when you can hit someone with a planet.” You could also check the European Judo Federation, where you’ll see headlines like “Europe example of good refereeing.”

But finally — we’re rescued! The International Judo Federation tells us who’s in!

Off we go, and remember that they award two bronze medals in each weight class.

Continue reading 2012 medal projection update: Judo

2012 judo: No chops allowed

Sorry, Austin Powers fans, there is no such thing as a “judo chop.” Judo is a grappling sport, with throws, takedowns and submissions from chokes or armbars.

So it’s still a viable component of mixed martial arts, and a few athletes have made the leap from Olympic competition to the cage. Karo Parisyan is the long-standing prototype, but we’ve seen some more accomplished judo athletes such as Rick Hawn and Ronda Rousey make the jump more recently.

Whether the MMA boom sparks more spillover interest into judo, as it has in wrestling, is yet to be seen. Maybe it would help if Japan, the traditional home of judo and still its major power, didn’t have an MMA scene in decline.

As in boxing, we have two bronze medalists per event here, though it’s not quite a simple knockout tournament. If you lose to someone who advances far in the bracket, you’re eligible for a repechage bracket. Fight your way through that, and you can fight for one of two bronze medals. The new format in World Championships and 2012: Losing quarterfinalists square off to start the repechage, with winners facing losing semifinalists for bronze. Still doesn’t quite erase the luck of the draw, but it gives athletes a second chance of sorts.

Unlike a lot of sports, judo is truly global. When we say “Asia” is strong, we don’t just mean “China, Japan and the Koreas.” Mongolia and various countries ending in “-stan” are also strong. Europe also has a diverse group of world-class judokas. North Africa has a few contenders, and the Americas manage to break through every once in a while.

Continue reading 2012 judo: No chops allowed