Judo is the only martial art that has been defeated by paperwork. No opponent did this. No rival style exposed it in the cage. A room of men in blazers met in a hotel conference center, looked at one of the most complete grappling arts ever built, and voted, year after year, to make it less. They are still doing it. Judo is being strangled, slowly, by its own governing body, and the governing body keeps calling it a rule clarification.
Start with the leg grabs. There used to be an entire family of throws where you reached down, grabbed a man's leg, and introduced him to the planet. Morote-gari. Kata-guruma, where you fold a grown adult across your shoulders like a beach towel. Gone. Banned. A judoka in 1984 could shoot in and dump you on your head. A judoka now who touches your thigh gets a penalty and a stern look, as if he had reached for something that was not on the menu.
Then they came for everything else. You cannot stall, but you also cannot grip too aggressively, but you also cannot refuse to grip, but you also cannot grip and not attack, and every one of these is a shido, the penalty for the crime of not entertaining the judges fast enough. So you get the modern match: four minutes of two men slapping at each other's lapels like they are both trying to fix the same crooked tie. The single most important skill in elite judo is now winning a thumb war for a fistful of cotton. Somewhere Jigoro Kano is doing a slow ne-waza roll in his grave, except the referee would stand him back up after twelve seconds for insufficient progress.
The ground game got the same treatment. Get a throw, hit the mat, start working a pin or a strangle, and a man in a tracksuit yells "matte" and resets you both to standing because the floor portion is bad television. They gave the audience a sport about finishing fights and then forbade anyone from finishing one. And the blue gi, the whole blue gi, exists so a camera can tell the two pajama men apart. The art got redesigned for the broadcast truck.
The throws they did keep are unreal. A clean uchi-mata or a seoi-nage is the closest a human body comes to turning physics into art, and a black belt can put you down so hard your ancestors feel it. That is the tragedy, Judo did not lose its teeth in a fight. It filed them down itself, one committee vote at a time, so the broadcast would run on schedule.