Is British Judo on the rise?

With the fantastic results of the European championships this week there will be the inevitable response of how great British judo has become/is becoming since it moved to a centralised programme at Walsall but what do the numbers tell us?

First of all, this has been a valiant effort by the British team and I would like to congratulate all the athletes, in particular, the 5 that won medals.

Sally Conway – Silver

Ashley McKenzie – Bronze

Gemma Howell – Bronze

Lucy Renshall – Bronze

Natalie Powell – Bronze

So how do these results compare to previous years? I’ve decided to stick to this century and go back to 2000. It would be hard to compare going back much further and 2000 seems like a good break point to me. There are several ways to present this data, I could do what most people do and select the one that suits my agenda or what I want to say but I think that isn’t fair and to be honest, if I have an agenda its objectivity so I have decided to present the data in a number of ways and let the reader make up their own mind.

If we base performance solely on medal count then 2018 is our most successful performance this century (since 2000). Personally, I am not convinced medal count alone is a good measure but winning 5 medals, the most we’ve won in 19 European championships is great. Below I have broken our medal tally at the European championships down by year and equating medal colour to the current number of points awarded on the IJF world ranking list. I think this is a fairly good way of presenting the data.

 

Figure 1: World ranking points that would have been awarded based on the current world ranking points systems from 2000 – 2018.

 

If we ranked the results in order of points awarded then 2018 would be our joint 3rd most successful year. Table 1 shows all years ranked in points order.

Rank	Year	gold	silver	bronze	score
1	2006	2		2	2100
2	2005	1	2	1	2030
3	2003	1	1	2	1890
4	2018		1	4	1890
5	2000		3	1	1820
6	2004		2	1	1330
7	2002	1	1		1190
8	2016		1	1	840
9	2007			2	700
10	2010			2	700
11	2011			2	700
12	2017			2	700
13	2009		1		490
14	2001			1	350
15	2012			1	350
16	2013			1	350
17	2008				0
18	2014				0
19	2015				0

Of course, there are the purists who would only like to count gold medals. Well, it is 12 years since we won a gold medal and in those 2006 European championships, we won two golds – Craig Fallon and Sarah Clarke. In fact, we have only won 5 European gold medals this century, the two above and Karina Bryant in 2005 and 2003, Georgina Singleton in 2002.

Of course, there are others ways to measure the performance, the number of fights won compared to the number of players competing (too much work for this post i’m afraid) and the quality of the fights are two examples. I did watch all the GB fights but I would want to watch them again without the emotion to judge that and give an opinion. My first impressions are that actually, our players are fighting very well at the moment. Natalie and Sally are extremely consistent and easily world class. This was Lucy’s first Europeans and she won a bronze, how Gemma has come through so many injuries and three weight groups to medal at this level is nothing short of miraculous and Ashley has achieved a second bronze despite fighting his opponents and the system simultaneously. If I was to pick one thing I find frustrating it would be this new habit of some British players to “beg for a score” or “beg for a score to be upgraded“. I don’t like this, I think they miss opportunities, particularly in transition to Ne-waza and arguing a score is arguably the coaches job, the athletes should focus on nothing but fighting. I don’t blame the players, there could be a number of reasons, lack of trust in the coaches, lack of faith in the referees, or the constant changes in rules (although not all athletes from all countries do it) to name a few.

So what do we conclude? Well based solely on medal count we’ve done very well, our best Europeans this century. I am sure most people would agree the medal tally of 2006 (2 golds and two bronze) is better than of 2018 (1 silver and 4 bronze) as we regularly see medal tables with gold medals taking up the top slots ie one gold medal would put you above teams with multiple medals (those pesky purists!).

I think the fairest way for me is the points system, its objective and based on this system we can also look at trends in more detail. There does seem to be a trend of improvement from 2016 onwards, in fact, may be looking in more detail we just had a number of ‘difficult years’ between 2007 – 2015 and really we’ve always been great in Great Britain!

Anyway, our best European championships since 2006 and a trend for continuous improvement over the last three European championships. We should be pleased with this and hope a similar trend is seen at world level in Baku 2018 and Tokyo 2019 over the next two years and of course at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games.

 

Sources:

http://www.Judoinside.com/uk

http://www.judobase.org

http://www.ippon.org

http://www.EJU.net (image source)

To have rankings or not to have rankings that is the question?

I have been involved in a few conversations recently about the worthiness of the GB ranking system so I thought I would put my thoughts into a blog post. As some who lectures in talent develop and identification this is an area I know a little about.

Firstly what is the GB ranking system? Well figure 1 below shows the current GB system as it stands for 2015 for seniors. Basically you accumulate points for placing or winning a medal at a variety of events and those points vary depending upon the  level of the competition.

Its a very simple system in my opinion and to be honest I think it works pretty well, below I have outlined what I feel are the advantages and disadvantages. We have to remember that the ranking system is ultimately about two things – Talent Identification and Talent Selection.

Advantages

• It means selection in not based on a single event – single event are well known for “missing talented athletes” often because they miss an event, have one poor day performing or a ill and sometime because of relative age affect
• If we consider it from a domestic perspective it can be argued that travel is split around the country with each area represented evenly and all four home country represented
• The system is tiered, what I mean by this is a younger or less experienced athlete can gain ranking points at area event; more experience athletes can decided to only look at home country events to secure points (because you get more points) while taking chances at European cups. Furthermore international athletes can focus on international events and still remain top of the domestic rankings. They do not need to attend these events although they may decided to do one or two home country one. What this means in effect is that athletes 8-10yrs from podium can focus on area events and home country events, athletes who are 8-5 year from podium can focus on home country and European cups whilst those likely to hit podium in this Olympic cycle can focus on world ranking events (these years boundaries a rough and off the top of my head! I appreciate many athletes need long at world ranking level and appreciate many have already come through the cadet and junior system)
• It is great for marketing and promoting judo. If someone is 10th in the +78kg in GB for example we might not think about it but going to that athletes college, university and local press they see this as a big thing and that really helps promote judo and support the athlete
• It allows athletes and coaches to start appreciating a ranking system and how to “work it” and this is very helpful when athletes progress through to world ranking events
• You’re still testing an athletes ability to “perform on the day” because of the weighting of points in relation to the British champs

Disadvantages

• Arguably it can be expensive, especially if “chasing points” or you’re injured when the ones nearer to you are running. My personal opinion is if you’re “chasing points” you’re better off spending the money on some training camps or an extra nights randori a week and think about ranking the following year. of course everyones situation is different though
• A ranking system needs depth to work and unfortunately many, if not all, of our ranking events are lacking depth at the moment, below I have outlined why I think this might be. without depth the wrong players can end up ranked, in theory this should sort itself out at the British champs but not always
• You can end up with too many events if you’re not careful, I think in GB at the moment the issue is more around the somewhat horrendous calendar control though and this is quite frankly because of some areas poor understanding of the affect they’re having with the petty, mindless, bullshit politics
• I will talk more about quality control below but lets be honest, the way many of these are run is nothing short of appalling. People have to understand that this is our talent identification system and talent selection system, it does matter how good our centralised programme is if this system is wrong. We have a £7.4m budget for producing medals but we cannot do this is the wrong players are being selected or if the real talent is leaving the sport

Why are people not attending?

• Quality of the events – No care system, poor mats, manual score boards, awful venues, rood staff/officials, no warm up area… the list goes on. If we want a decent ranking system we need to change how we think about it.
• Quality of refereeing – of course referees make mistakes, no problem. With the CARE system there should be very few though. The level of referees at these events often need to be considered more closely and some areas are going to have to invest in paying for referees to travel and stay over because you haven’t got enough decent ones in your area – this is the price of neglecting referee education and training over the years i’m afraid. I love the comment we always get when we complain about refereeing… we’re all volunteers! Yes we know that but your travel and food is paid! Most of the coaches are volunteers to and their travel and food isn’t paid. And guess what? The athletes are paying customers and they don’t give a shit if you’re a volunteer or not, they have paid for a service. Like I said at the start, of course referees make mistakes, everyone does, no problem but for referees to not be using the CARE system properly or to have two kids sat there who don’t dare to overrule the IJF in the middle is not right and you know it!
• Calendar control – This weekend we have the Great North and the Southern area – how? Who let this happen? One was a cadet ranking and now isn’t…. come on!
• Centralisation – lets be honest, it has an affect and we all know it
• Online calendar – OMG!! Seriously no entry form the Welsh on the BJA site yet! BJA site still say no date for the Easter area ranking event that was in August. We cannot generate depth with such awful communication!!

Some ideas for improving the ranking events/system…

• Quality control similar to that of the EJU and IJF. Areas and home countries can still run the event but these are monitored by either the BJA events team or a bespoke team that is designed to manage British ranking events (PMG maybe!?!?!)
• Should the BJA have a set of mats, a CARE system (with two cameras per mat), score boards and TVs for the draw etc in a truck that goes around to every ranking event? Personally I think it has got to that stage or they should invest in this for each area
• If we sort this out, banners, decent mats, online registration, good referees etc etc could we attract sponsorship? I think we could argue it is pretty much a national league, maybe we could attract prize money or maybe they just pay for some of things we need to make it all more professional? The British champs are run well so we have a model already
• You know what I would really like to see, it would take some work but I think each home country event should be run on the first weekend of a school holiday or half term and they should all be followed by a hard training compound this camp should be part of our talent ID system
• The calendar needs aligning, British champs first, then Home country and then are and ideally they’ll alternate what end of the country the area ones are in to help travel

To be honest this little rant has gone on much longer than I thought and I need to get to training so i’ll call soremade!

Here’s the real question though, get rid of it and what do we replace it with? Please comment below!

The summer block has started….

Monday saw the start of the summer block of the European Judo Union Level 4 performance coach award.

As explained in my previous post there are 4 modules – year one are predominantly doing physiology, year two are doing biomechanics and Strength & Conditioning.

 

Today has seen our first years looking at EMG and our second years doing strength and conditioning. There was also a keynote session by world and Olympic champion Maki Tsukada (JPN)

Here are some photos from so far….

 

 

 

45 sec rule….

Just a quick post, following on from my last one really. Whilst teaching undergrad sports students to teach in schools I made a rule – you can only talk for 45 seconds at a time!

We timed people talking/demonstrating and observed the children to see when the lost interest, 45sec was about the max time. Last week when I spoke to my coaches about the session I mentioned this, the idea is the children spend more time doing and less time pretending to listen!

 

I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂

New class structure…..

I am currently in a very fortunate position to have 4 newly qualified level 2 coaches at the club. All 4 of them are technically very proficient and we run the class in a sort of “round robin”. We have a children’s class with about 30 kids in, we split the session so they all warm up together (normally some sort of game followed by gymnastics, ukemi and ebi).

Then we split them into groups and we have 2-4 “stations” with each group doing 10 mins at each station (for example one on kumi kata, one on a throw and one on a hold down/turnover).

This works great, the kids don’t get bored, coaches only have 10 minutes so if there is an annoying kid or it isn’t going well it’s not long. Also we normally have two stations running at once so each coach gets a rest session and we have a “policemen” who can go from group to group and help with coaching points or discipline.

We then move on to randori (nage waza and ne waza) before finishing with some sort of game and a cool down.

The cool down is normally taken by one of the sports leaders and this gives me the chance to quickly de-brief the coaches on their coaching.

Here are some pictures…

Ne waza with Mike, you can see me on the right watching both sessions

In this one Glenn is taking the nage waza and I have come across as the “policeman”

In this one you can see the nage waza session and the ne waza in the background

Glenn with the little ones…