Category — Judo

Methinks those silly South Korean school girls should now end their obsession with Rain and focus their attention to judoka Choi Minho who won the first gold medal for South Korea. He’s got everything that matters: good looks and an Olympic gold medal. Does Rain have a gold medal? None. Nada. Zero.

And here’s another reason why you schoolgirls should like Minho: he believes in his parent’s dreams and these dreams do come true. From monstersandcritics:

Minho later revealed that his parents had recently dreamed of a big moment.

‘I want to tell my mother. Before I came to Beijing my mother had a dream that a lot of people came to our house to say congratulations to Minho. My father said he also had a dream, that ‘the sun shone from his heart.’

‘I can’t believe that the dreams have come true,’ said Choi, who improved from his bronze medal finish 2004 in Athens.

[Read more →]

Romania’s judoka Alina Alexandra Dumitru should write a book entitled “How to Win an Olympic Gold Medal in 80 Seconds“. I think it will be a best seller.

Felicitări, Alina, you made Romania very proud indeed.

Romania related:
Nicolae Linca, Gold Medalist, 79

Photo credit: chinadaily.com

Finally. After previously posting about ten male Olympic flag bearers, it’s good to come across a woman flag bearer: judoka Vivian Yusuf of Nigeria. Yusuf is a silver medalist during the recently concluded African Judo Championships in Morocco and is the only judoka from Africa who is going to Beijing.

Nigeria-related posts:
Show Us the Money
Meet Our Idol: Nigerian President Umar Musa Yar’Adua
Nigeria’s Olusoji Fasuba on Yesterday’s Athletes Who Beg on the Streets, etc.
Country Report: Nigeria in Past Olympics and Predictions for Beijing 2008

Photo source: AFP via daylife

What earned judoka Ilias Iliadis the right to be his country’s Olympic flag bearer? He bagged a gold medal during the Athens 2004 Games and could very well bag another one in Beijing. Since Greece is traditionally the first country to enter the Olympic stadium, Ilias will be the very first athlete to appear at the Bird’s Nest when the Games open in August 8, 2008.

Photo source: BBC

Did she defect to the United States? Or did something bad happen to her that we still don’t know about? Yurisel Laborde is a Cuban judoka who won a bronze medal during the 2004 Olympics in Athens. She also boasts of two Judo World Championships gold medals which she bagged in 2005 and 2007.

After winning a gold medal during the 2008 Pan American Judo Championships in Miami last week, Yurisel disappeared. Pretty mysterious, eh?

Maybe the “family-style atmosphere” within Cuba’s sports program which we blogged about earlier, isn’t as enticing as the greener pastures of the good old US of A?