Paul Sheals – Judo History
I was approached by a good friend to try and help raise some money for the young fighters at Camberley. For the past ten years I have been building a business in Search Engine Marketing where I know service over 600 small to medium sized business clients. From the age of 6 through 26 my passion was Judo and I was lucky enough to compete for my country for many years. So I decided to try and combine my two passions in life to see if I could use Search Engine Marketing and Social networking as a way of raising money for these talented young athletes. Over the weekend I decided to get stuck into some research and so I have looked at a number of Judo web sites from all over the world and I came across http://www.judoinside.com which is a great site (still growing) carrying some amazing statistics and details of tournaments and fighters from many years ago. The guys that own and run the site are Hans Osinga and Hans Van Essen and they always need accurate results and player profile information so any old boys and girls out there that have any old competition sheets or medal results from any international tournaments I am sure they would be really pleased to receive them (they cannot publish head to heads or competition results without full medalists and or pool sheets).
Whilst looking at this site I found myself remembering some outstanding fighters, tournaments and great friends and rivals. With this in mind I started to follow other threads and ended up finding another fabulous site that had aggregated a number of Judo video’s from Youtube mainly the site is called http://www.judovision.org where you can search by tournament, player, year etc.
There were some links to videos where I came across some great contests with players I hadn’t watched for years. I had forgotten how good Thiery Rey (FRA) actually was, Kashiwazaki (JPN), Soloduchin (USSR), Hosokawa (JPN), Nishida (JPN) amongst many are all great fighters that any current young player should watch.
I then stumbled upon a video of David Bodaveli (GEO) who had to be the strongest Judo player I have ever seen (there were other contenders – Nowak (FRA), Berthet (FRA), Nastula (POL), Van de Walle (BEL) but nothing compared to Bodaveli. I once watched him take a high lapel grip and then reach round the guys back with his other arm and rip the fighters kit in half (anyone who has picked up a kit will know how much strength this takes).
This got me thinking about what was the best fight I ever saw, best throw, best tournament etc. So it would be interesting to get other opinions. This could be done by decade, weight catagory, country etc.
The best throw I ever saw was in the World Championships (ESP) I fought a Japanese fighter called Sakahita in the semi final and lost on a Koka (I was lucky enough to go on and win the bronze) however the Japanese fighter fought Kosmynin (USSR) in the final. Kosmynin went on to win many major tournament medals. The Japanese fighter pulled off the greatest Osoto Gari in history (in my opinion of course but anyone who saw it would have to agree) – incidentally if anyone has the video of this share it on youtube for the rest of the world to see. Another candidate might be Podubni (USSR) who was a great fighter I recall he used to run out of steam after three minutes but for three minutes he was amazing. Koga would have to be right up there as one of the most talented throwers (I recall training with him Japan as a youngster and he was pretty amazing). So you get the point best throw, best tournament, best fighter let me know your thoughts.
Visit http://paulsheals.blogspot.com or leave a post here with your ideas.
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