JudoNotes

Thanks to Paul Virtue for iPhoning me these photos of Kevin passing the kata portion of his shodan test, with Shintaro Higashi as his uke. Congratulations, Kevin!

Belated congratulations to Alberto Botero on his promotion to yellow belt. I meant to post this on October 25, when this photo was taken.

Kevin McGrath threw for ippon twice with hiza-guruma. The ref was blocking my view of the first one, but upon reviewing the video I'm pretty sure it was hiza-guruma.

John Harris made batsugun with four ippons: two throws, an osae-komi, and an armbar.

Rich Fabella, who was there to spectate, pointed out something I hadn't noticed: the refs were allowing plenty of time for newaza before calling matte. If this is a new trend, I approve. (By the way, thanks to Rich for the ride home.)

When the tournament was over I got some much-needed exercise myself by helping pick up and stack the mats.

Here are Kevin's two throws for ippon:

Here are John's matches. You can hear Alison rooting for him from the sidelines:

Congratulations to Jason Mitchell, who got promoted to sankyu last night. I haven't had a chance to practice much with Jason lately, but the last time we did uchikomi, I noticed a huge difference in how smoothly he was moving. Of course he's always clobbered me, but the way he clobbers me is much different these days.

Here he is being congratulated by Masa:

Sensei will be having a dojo tournament on Saturday, September 6, the weekend after Labor Day and two weeks before the East Coast. Dojo tournaments are a good way to learn how tournament matches work, and they're fun. Sensei uses them as occasions to hand out promotions.

As usual, I'll be there with my camcorder and I'll post highlights to YouTube. If you're curious to see how your judo looks (and I personally think it's very interesting and sometimes instructive to see), you can ask me to post your match to YouTube or simply give you a copy.

Sensei would like to have a dojo tournament some Saturday before the East Coast. The date is TBD. Stay tuned.

Our dojo was used for a segment on Sinovision, which is a Chinese-language cable station. At the moment you can see it here. (I say "at the moment" because I don't know how long Sinovision keeps videos on their web site.) It's an introduction to judo for people who might be seeing the sport for the first time as they watch the Olympics. They also do a brief profile of Zhou Ai-Ming (aka Amy), whom I've seen in the dojo a couple of times but haven't met. She's working at the Olympics in Beijing.

There is a text version of the piece, with photos that aren't from the video. For those of you who don't speak Mandarin or read Chinese, here's the article translated to English by Google:

• page 1
• page 2
• page 3
• page 4

Note that the "Ai" in Zhou Ai-Ming's name means "love," which is why that word appears several times in the translation.

Here are Paul and Jeff a few minutes after Sensei gave Paul his black belt.

[Click the photo to go to the Flickr page]

Congratulations to Paul Virtue and Jon Klein, who passed their shodan tests yesterday.

Here's a group photo after the results were announced:

[Click the photo to go to the Flickr page]

Here's a video of Paul's kata:

UPDATE: Sorry if you came looking for this and there was no text or video. A spammer managed to corrupt this post. It's fixed now.

Hearty congratulations to Reuben and Abigale, whose first child arrived on Tuesday, May 27 at 10:01 AM. Reuben writes:

Her name is Lucy Knapp Govender and she arrived very happily weighing in at solid 6 pounds 15 ounces (not sure if there is a Judo weight category for her !!!) and she measured 21 inches long which I am reliably informed is "tall" for a newborn. In any case, I promised Sensei and Barbara that I would bring pictures but it seems I will most likely not be at the dojo for a while until my wife and I get into some sort of non-sleep-deprived schedule.

Click below to see what a beauty she is: