International Judo is so Competitive
- Thread starter Sauron
- Start date
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2002
- Messages
- 8,315
- Reaction score
- 5
At the international competitive level olympic style wrestling is just as diverse as judo. Both sports are strong and weak in regions around the world. For example, freestyle wrestling (for men) is not strong in western europe, but outside of Germany it never has been strong; greco roman has been the main style which has significantly weakened since the end of the Soviet Union. Wrestling is pocketed in central and south america much like every sport outside of soccer and boxing. As for Africa, almost every country does have national competition feeding into international competition but lack of money, wars and politics make their presence at the top of the international scene very, very rare.Sauron said:
The numbers of participants given in whatever sport have to be scrutinized, the US soccer organization lists a huge number of participants but they base that by multiple counting (a boy/girl on a school team & a club team is generally counted twice) and surveys that don't really reflect actual competitive participation (sidenote, many US sports organizations do this: Question: have you played basketball once, either organized or pickup game in the past year ? Answer: once. Result: you are a basketball player).
Another poster posted nearly one billion people practice judo; no way. You could combine all grappling & boxing athletes and you probably still wouldn't have that number. No way 15% of the world practices judo or any other combination of grappling sports.
Sport sanctioning bodies also get into the act, Judo has some pacific island countries listed but they don't field a team. Wrestling there doesn't fare much better. Last year one island national team (Samoa maybe) missed the Oceania championships in freestyle because they couldn't coordinate the trip. They ended up sending their freestyle wrestlers to the greco championships. Or maybe it was the other way around; however it was, they only had a team in one style and they missed that style's championship so they sent that team to the other style's Oceania championship tournament.
The world medals in wrestling are spread out over many countries, granted their are some countries that consistently grab many (for example Russia, Cuba, Iran, USA) the competition is diverse across the board: medal matches, semis, top 10. Women's wrestling is dominated by Japan but they also have a lot of diversity especially since they only started to hold a world championship in 1987, some countries strong in men's wrestling don't support women's wrestling; on the other hand, some western european countries have strong women's teams.
I don't like the two bronze medal winners at each weight division and for some reason FILA (wrestling's world organizing body) has decided to do the same thing these year, along with one day tournament. FILA wanted to switch because it seemed to work well for judo but at the same time judo was looking at adopting a multi day tournament style similar to FILA's because they thought it worked better for the athletes.
Odium said:
Its go nothing to do with sportsman ship! The fact is many people in the Middle East (and in the world) see the Zionist state of Israel as a fascist state; just like the fascist state of apartheid South Africa was boycotted in the sporting level, it wasn
