Four shido categories and every one of them is a judgement call by a guy with a button. You cannot grip too hard, cannot refuse to grip, cannot grip without attacking. So the ref decides who was stalling and that decision wins the match. I have sat in stands for nine years watching kids lose on a phantom passivity call. This is the exact rot, except now it is the Olympics instead of a strip mall gym four hours from my house.
Did judo ban its own best moves until it became a fight over a sleeve?
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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.
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Four shido categories and every one of them is a judgement call by a guy with a button. You cannot grip too hard, cannot refuse to grip, cannot grip without attacking. So the ref decides who was stalling and that decision wins the match. I have sat in sta
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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.
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ok genuinely new to all of this so help me out. they banned grabbing someone's leg to trip them, but you can still choke a person until they go to sleep? what is the actual line they are drawing here lol
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Every sport that chases a broadcast deal ends up sanding off the exact thing that made it worth filming. Judo is just further down the road than most. They will call the next cut fan friendly, and the fans they mean are the ones who do not watch judo.
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The thing nobody is saying: cap ne-waza time long enough and you do not just shorten the ground game, you stop producing anyone who is good at it. Skill is reps. Give a generation thirty seconds on the floor before a reset and they never learn to hold position properly.
So the next round of officials looks at weak groundwork and goes see, the ground is boring, cut it more. It eats itself.
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Judo is the only art that got submitted by its own rulebook. No opponent, no cage, just a hotel conference room going twelve to four on whether you can touch a thigh.
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Follow the money on this one, because the blazers always tell on themselves. The blue gi is the giveaway. Nobody invented a second color so judokas could express themselves. They invented it so a broadcast camera could tell two pajamas apart. Once you see the sport got redesigned for the truck, the rest lines up:
leg grabs cut because shoots look messy on a wide shot
shido stacked on so the clock never has a dead stretch
ground stalls reset because a strangle takes too long for the segment
None of that is about the art. It is all about not running long on the schedule.
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Morote-gari is a DOUBLE LEG. Kata-guruma is a fireman's carry. Those are not exotic judo secrets, those are the first two takedowns any wrestling room teaches a fourteen year old. Judo had the best standing grappling on earth and then voted to delete the part where you shoot a leg. You banned wrestling out of the one sport that married it to throws. WHY. I will never recover from this.
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Defeated by paperwork is exactly right, and the paperwork is the whole point. Kano spent a lifetime building a curriculum and a room of officials erase a throw family with a single agenda item and call it a rule clarification. A clarification clarifies. This deletes. You do not get to amend a man's lineage by committee vote between the coffee break and lunch.
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Four shido categories and every one of them is a judgement call by a guy with a button. You cannot grip too hard, cannot refuse to grip, cannot grip without attacking. So the ref decides who was stalling and that decision wins the match. I have sat in stands for nine years watching kids lose on a phantom passivity call. This is the exact rot, except now it is the Olympics instead of a strip mall gym four hours from my house.
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Four minutes of two grown men slapping at each other's lapels like they're fixing the same crooked tie. In boxing we have a name for guys who fight for the collar and never commit. We call them clinchers, and the ref breaks it up. Here it's the main event.
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A whole art slowly stripped of its force, and instead of resisting it simply agrees, year after year, and floats on. Honestly the most aikido thing judo has ever done. I admire it.