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Shohei Ono, the consecutive champion of the Olympics, has the power to overcome “winning and of course” | NIKKEI STYLE

Ohno who won the Tokyo Olympics in a row. The pressure should have been considerable, but how did it get rid of it?

Nikkei Gooday

In the Tokyo Olympics Judo Men’s 73 kg Final, he won the championship with Lasha Shavdatu Asibiri (Georgia) after a deadly battle of 9 minutes and 26 seconds. Shohei Ono has achieved the feat of winning the Olympics for the second time in a row, the seventh in history in Japanese judo and the fourth in boys. We asked him about the pressure and anguish that he was naturally required to win in a row because he was at the top, and what kind of mentality he had overcome the unprecedented postponement of the Olympics and led to the result.

After the Rio Olympics, write a master’s thesis on the theme of Osotogari

――What kind of life do you have after the Tokyo Olympics?

I haven’t put my arm through the sleeve of a judo suit for a while. I spend my life eating delicious rice by moving my body comfortably, such as training my core, and sweating. Training is not a training because it is a painful and painful image for us.

――Even after winning the gold medal at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, you went on to graduate school and have been absent for a year.

After the Rio Olympics, the topic of the next Tokyo Olympics was always set, and Rio had an atmosphere as if it was a run-up to Tokyo. In fact, few top athletes retired after the Rio Olympics, so I couldn’t feel like resting for a long time. However, “Judo, which is an amateur sport, is attracting attention only at the Olympics. After four years, it is important to have the courage to take a rest because we have to get results again,” said Tadahiro Nomura and other seniors at Tenri University. It was. I decided to take a break for a while and went on to graduate school at Tenri University, where I wrote a master’s thesis on the theme of Osotogari over a year.

――Is there a purpose to further study your own special skills for the Tokyo Olympics?

Since I was thinking of becoming a leader in the future, I wanted to be able to properly verbalize and explain the sensuous things of the technique.

Osotogari is one of the first techniques to learn in judo, but it is also a simple, deep and difficult technique that requires courage. Because, if you apply Osotogari, the other party will also be shaped like a mirror. Such a technique is only Osotogari, and I don’t understand it very much, and many judokas think about offensive and passive separately. That won’t win. In addition, there may be an image of defeating by force, but although the physical aspect is of course important, precise technology is required. I think that I was able to explain in an easy-to-understand manner by researching and discovering new perspectives and being able to further analyze my own technology.

But more than that, I got a by-product, or something that supports the mentality needed for this consecutive Olympic title. I was able to learn the history of judo that ignited my motivation by browsing the judo literature that was the source of my research.

The reason why I thought “the Tokyo Olympics have a fateful connection”

–what do you mean.

Judo became the first Olympic event at the last Tokyo Olympics (1964) and was held at the same Nippon Budokan as this time. Since it is a specialty of the host country, the Japanese team would have had pride and tremendous pressure, and I think that everyone in Japan thought that their home country would win with overwhelming strength. However, in the indiscriminate final on the final day, there was a big upheaval in which the Japanese national team was defeated by Dutch player Anton Geesink.

In the wake of this shocking defeat, Japan Judo will establish a private judo school “Kodo Gakusha” in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo with the aim of rebuilding. It is a prestigious cram school that later produced numerous Olympic medalists and world championship winners such as Toshihiko Koga and Hidehiko Yoshida. I have closed the school now, but when I was a junior high school student, I moved to Tokyo from Yamaguchi and studied at this Kodo Gakusha until high school.

Further tracing the history of Geesink, the base of training before the Tokyo Olympics was actually my alma mater, Tenri University. I learned that I had organized training camps many times before the Olympics and was instructed by Mr. Yasuichi Matsumoto, the first instructor of Tenri University and the director of the Japanese national team.

“Geesink, who was practicing at Tenri University, won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, which led to the establishment of Kodo Gakusha.” When I knew it, I felt a strong connection and connection with the path I followed and the path I was aiming for, and as if to put pressure on myself, “A player who has a fateful connection to this Tokyo Olympics as much as I do. I don’t have one. ” “That’s why I definitely win.” It was very important for me to maintain my motivation to have a strong sense of this story in myself and to go to the actual production. I think one of the factors that overcame the unforeseen situation that the Olympics were postponed.

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