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第 236 期·中文精讀

吉米·佩德羅：柔道與冠軍的鍛造

Jimmy Pedro: Judo and the Forging of Champions

奧運柔道獎牌得主與教練談技術細節、備戰奧運的心路與培養冠軍的方法。

吉米·佩德羅··存檔文稿·精讀約 1.6 萬字 · 閱讀 35 分鐘
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中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫，非官方翻譯，可能存在偏差或錯誤；表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明

Teddy Riner 在東京奧運會之前，已經在柔道重量級統治了十幾年。十次世界冠軍，兩屆奧運金牌，一百多場連勝，中間只輸過一兩場。

然後東京，他輸了。

柔道這項運動沒有安全網。一個失誤，一個 Ippon，比賽當場結束，沒有回合，沒有補救，沒有下一節。你今天準備了四年，可能四秒鐘就沒了。

所以當你看到一個人統治一個級別十幾年，那不是簡單的"強"。那是全世界都在研究他的每一個動作、每一段節奏、每一個可以攻破的漏洞，而他還在贏。

這是 Jimmy Pedro 在這期播客裡反覆繞回的主題：在這個專案裡保持統治有多難，而從第一次踏進道館到站上奧運領獎臺，中間到底要過多少道關。

Pedro 是美國柔道繞不開的名字。四屆奧運會，1992、1996、2000、2004，兩枚銅牌。三屆世錦賽獎牌，1999 年拿到世錦賽金牌。退役後做教練，帶出過 Kayla Harrison、Ronda Rousey、Travis Stevens 這些人，現在也是 Lex Fridman 自己的柔道教練。

柔道沒有安全網

為什麼在柔道里長期不敗這麼難？Pedro 的解釋很直接：因為一旦你是世界第一，全世界都在針對你訓練。

整個世界的訓練都朝著打敗你一個方向去。他們研究你的每一個動作，研究你的模式，試圖拆解你，找出你比賽裡的破綻。你是世界第一的時候，所有人都在獵你，尤其是在奧運會上。（Jimmy Pedro）

更麻煩的是心理那一層。你是奪冠熱門，壓力最大的是你。旗手是你，聚光燈是你，所有人預設你該贏。所以一旦比賽開局不順，陷入一場苦戰，那種"輸不起"的重量會全部壓在熱門選手身上。Pedro 說，這就是為什麼奧運會上經常是"另一個"人贏。

Teddy Riner 就是在這種位置上一路贏過來的。Pedro 在法國坐大巴時挨著他坐過，說他的腿有自己腰那麼粗，身高快兩米，體重一百四十公斤。這種體格能拿十次世界冠軍，在 Pedro 看來幾乎難以理解。

但有意思的是，Pedro 並不認為 Riner 是技術最細膩的那一類。他的評價是：力量、爆發、身體條件都是怪物級別，但真正的殺手鐧是抓把。

重量級選手的通病是什麼？抓住道服就硬碰硬，你一拳我一拳，最後打得亂七八糟。Riner 不一樣，他控制把位，控制整場比賽的移動節奏，對手根本沒有發動進攻的機會。他不是靠精彩的技術贏，他是先讓你沒法打，再慢慢把你拆掉。

東京奧運會上，Riner 輸給了喬治亞的 Tamerlan Bashaev。如果那一場贏了，他可能就是三屆奧運冠軍。Pedro 說這事讓人難過，因為 Riner 是個謙遜的冠軍，是"人民的冠軍"，法國柔道聯合會把他照顧得很好，他是這個專案的終身偶像。看到一個好人以這種方式掉下神壇，總歸是心疼的。

但這也是奧運會的一部分。偉大的人，有時候也會倒下。

誰配得上"最偉大"

Pedro 的衡量標準很簡單：能不能在世錦賽和奧運會的最高舞臺上，一次又一次地證明自己。

按這個標準，他說野村忠宏（Tadahiro Nomura）是繞不過去的名字：60 公斤級，三屆奧運冠軍。輕量級能做到這個成績，在柔道史上非常罕見。

現役裡，他提到 Shohei Ono。73 公斤級，兩屆奧運冠軍，最近八年只輸過兩場。Ono 的標誌性技術是內股（Uchi Mata），而且他做的內股跟所有人都不一樣，動作很怪，但停不下來。Pedro 說，他一進來，沒人擋得住。

內股是 Pedro 心中最美的投技。理由很樸素：幅度最大。

一個人被挑到最高點，進攻者的腿從中間掃過，被摔的人整個翻過去，頭朝下，背砸地。整個過程裡，四條腿同時離地，兩個人一起在空中轉，然後摔的人壓在被摔的人身上。

這個技術難學也難教。你要單腿站立，另一條腿從中間甩上去，把對手架在髖上，同時自己的後背完全對著對方。Pedro 說，這大概是柔道里最難學的投技之一，因為你必須在空中完成一個兩人一起的翻滾，還要保證最後落在正確的位置。

還有一類人，成績不一定最硬，但美的瞬間最多，比如 Koga（古賀稔彥）。Pedro 承認這種評判也有它的道理：柔道史上有很多技術華麗到不像話的選手，只是沒能在最高舞臺上把最好的自己兌現出來。

舉一個反例：七十到八十年代有個叫 Fuji 的選手，連續四屆世錦賽冠軍。那個年代世錦賽兩年一屆，算下來是八年的統治。但他從沒參加過奧運會，所以永遠進不了"最偉大"的那張桌子。

三條路，美國卡在十三歲

從第一天上課到拿奧運獎牌，這條路怎麼走，很大程度上取決於你在哪個國家出生。

日本是一條流水線。小學柔道、初中柔道、高中柔道、大學柔道、奧運代表隊，一級一級往上，跟美國的摔跤系統很像。當整個國家是一部生產頂級運動員的機器時，所有退役的高手都會回到系統裡當教練，每一個層級都有人，連小學都有專業教練。所以作為國家隊教練，在那種環境裡你不需要"造"冠軍，你只需要坐著看，看誰自己冒出來。

美國是另一種活法。你沒有一千個人可以挑，你手裡可能只有幾個人，甚至只有一個笑嘻嘻走進道館說"我想拿奧運獎牌"的小孩。你要做的是把手裡這點材料，一點一點雕成冠軍。

Pedro 說，前半程美國其實不落後。十三歲之前，美國小孩的技術和世界水平是在一個檔次上的，打得過。分水嶺出現在青少年階段，也就是十三到十九歲。

那個階段，日本和歐洲開始上強度：每個週末八百到一千人的訓練營，成體系的教練組，一年幾十場高水平比賽。美國這邊，孩子要麼被摔跤吸走，要麼因為看不到清晰的上升通道而退出。Pedro 說這是美國柔道幾十年真正的軟肋，就在這個年齡段。

所以美國的路只能靠"土辦法"補：一週五天泡在道館，加技術課，加體能，一個月打一兩次比賽，用比賽代替高質量訓練夥伴。因為你在訓練裡遇不到那麼多強手，你只能在賽場上去捱打、去暴露弱點、再去修補。

Pedro 把這套東西叫做"美國柔道系統"。核心邏輯是：不去和日本拼技術細膩度，不去和歐洲拼身體對抗的密度，而是把每個人的天賦技術打磨到極致，然後在外面套一層美式的抓把體系、寢技體系、體能體系、心理體系和比賽計劃。這層"外掛"，才是美國選手能贏的原因。

1996 年亞特蘭大，主場的那一分鐘

問 Pedro 職業生涯最定義性的時刻，他給的答案是 1996 年亞特蘭大奧運會的銅牌戰。

那屆比賽開打到現在，美國隊一塊獎牌都沒拿到，一塊都沒有。比賽在主場，看臺上坐著他的全部家人、朋友、布朗大學摔跤隊的隊友、叔叔阿姨，所有在他運動生涯裡幫過他的人。用他的話說，那是"Jimmy Pedro 的一天"。

對手是巴西人，他之前贏過對方兩三次。但那天他落後了。他做體落（Tai Otoshi）進攻，對方等著反擊，拿到一個有效（yuko）。比賽進入最後一分鐘，他低頭整理道服，全場開始喊 USA、USA、USA。

他說那一刻整個人被灌滿了能量。走回去，重新抓把，還是體落，對方這次躲開了。他順勢換成內股，一本，贏。

美國柔道隊在那屆奧運會上拿到的唯一一塊獎牌。也是他職業生涯的第一塊奧運獎牌。

那個瞬間定義了我的職業生涯。從那一刻起我就認了，我必須再回奧運會，我要拿金牌，我要把這個感覺再來一遍。等四年我不在乎，就這麼幹。（Jimmy Pedro）

他說這段話的時候，人在地鐵上都能起雞皮疙瘩。講到這兒，他真的起了雞皮疙瘩。

恨輸，比愛贏更重要

Pedro 有一個判斷，我覺得是這期節目裡最鋒利的一句：

要成為冠軍，我的信念是你必須恨輸，超過你愛贏。（Jimmy Pedro）

但他緊接著補了一句：他是為贏了之後那些瞬間而活的。他喜歡決賽，喜歡聚光燈打在身上。他職業生涯裡金牌和銅牌一大堆，銀牌和第五名極少。原因很直白：要麼早早輸掉，根本沒進獎牌輪；要麼燈光亮起來，他就真的發光了。

決賽他不緊張。他不覺得那是壓力，他覺得那是屬於他的時刻，就是我和對面那個人之間的事。

這個心態不是天生的。他的父親老 Jim Pedro 是他的教練，一個在圈內很有名的人物。Pedro 對父親的評價分三層。

第一層，父親是他見過最直白的人。你要是胖，他會當面說你胖。你打得不好，他不會給你留面子，直接告訴你哪裡不對。他是最硬的試金石。

第二層，父親極其熱愛這項運動，是個真正的研究者，幫 Pedro 定義了整套比賽策略，永遠在想下一步。

第三層，父親大概是這個國家最擅長"把一個運動員的身體準備好"的人。Kayla Harrison 說過自己的備戰極其痛苦，Pedro 說那就是他父親的手筆。Ronda Rousey 生涯早期也被他父親帶到新罕布什爾，早上跑步，白天在地下室舉重，把一個俄羅斯女選手叫來，在水泥地上鋪一小塊墊子，讓她一早上摔一百次，晚上再去波士頓的訓練中心練，連著三週，然後去北京。

但父親有一個短板：心理建設。

Pedro 說他父親自己不是奧運冠軍，也不是世界冠軍，所以在幫別人建立"不可戰勝"的信念這件事上，他缺那點底氣。他擅長告訴你哪裡要改，不擅長把你托起來，讓你覺得自己天下無敵。

這一塊，Pedro 補上了。父子倆合起來，一個管身體和戰術，一個管信念和頭腦，成了一個很難複製的組合。

把奧運那一天在腦子裡過一千遍

Pedro 的心理訓練方法，具體到可以照著做。

第一步是把目標寫下來。不是嘴上說說，是寫到紙上。你想當全國冠軍、世界獎牌、奧運選手，寫下來，簽字，承諾。目標要夠得著，但也要拉伸，不能是白日夢。先從全國冠軍開始，再是世界隊，再是世界獎牌，最後才是奧運。

Kayla 2005 年剛來的時候，並沒有說"我要當奧運冠軍"。她先說的是全國冠軍，然後是世界隊，然後是世錦賽獎牌，最後才把目光放到奧運金牌上。

第二步是視覺化。Pedro 的建議是每天做，睡前、訓練前或者訓練後，挑一個固定時間。閉眼幾分鐘，把一整天從頭到尾在腦子裡過一遍，過得越真越好。

不是籠統地想"我拿了金牌"。是把奧運那一天完整地活一遍：早上醒來，站上體重秤，吃早飯，跟人開玩笑，回房間收拾柔道包，上大巴，走進場館，第一次看到比賽場地，進熱身區，抬頭看對陣表，看到自己第一輪的對手，做熱身，走出通道，打第一場，想象自己摔出那個動作，走下墊子跟教練擊掌，準備第二場。

一直活到終點：贏了，舉手慶祝，鞠躬，抱對手，下墊子抱教練，舉著國旗繞場，站上領獎臺，聽到自己的名字被念出來，"Olympic champion, Jimmy Pedro"，獎牌掛上脖子，跟身邊的人合影。

Pedro 說，練夠多次之後，腦內會踩出一條路。等你的身體真的走到那個時刻，你會覺得"我來過這兒，這是我的時刻，我這一輩子都在想這個畫面"，於是不緊張，毫不猶豫，因為這一切本來就該發生。

Travis Stevens 給這個方法加了一個關鍵細節：要視覺化"感覺"，不是從第三人稱看自己。

不是像看電視一樣看自己喝咖啡。是想手碰到溫熱杯子那一刻的觸感。抓道服是什麼手感，汗從額頭流下來是什麼感覺，手指纏膠布是什麼觸感，場館裡是什麼氣味。越具體、越有顏色、越真實，大腦就越信。

Pedro 說他自己講這些的時候，身體會真的回到那個狀態，起雞皮疙瘩，腋下出汗。因為他在腦中演練過太多次，也在現實裡經歷過，兩者已經混在一起。

這套方法不只用在柔道上。Pedro 說他的公司、他的道館、他想要的生活方式，最早都是"想出來"的。他跟妻子說過想有自己的生意，想自己當老闆，想一年賺多少錢。當時聽起來像個大數字。現在他做到了。也許不是五年，也許是十年，但你在路上。

從六十個學員到兩百人，同時養出奧運冠軍

Pedro 講過一段特別實在的商業故事。

他開道館很多年，學員一直在四十到六十人之間浮動。他想不通為什麼進不來人，就花錢請顧問來看。顧問進門第一句話：這地方太嚇人了。一個路人走進來，第一眼看到的是牆上的奧運冠軍照片，然後看到墊子上有人被摔得飛起來、重重砸地。你告訴一個白帶這是給他的課？他當然轉身就走。

第二個問題：一節課一個半到兩小時，新人根本撐不住。

Pedro 認了。他重做了整個課程體系，分年齡、分級別，四到六歲一個班，六到十三歲一個班，初學者單獨一個班，不許

初學者單獨一個班，不許和高階別混在一起。他要把道館從"只有想練狠的人才待得下去"，改成"任何人都能進來"。

然後顧問扔給他一句話：你能讓很多人來練，那這就是個休閒道館。休閒道館養不出冠軍。

Pedro 不服。2006 年，他把所有黑帶叫到一起，講了自己的願景：我要一個兩百人以上的純柔道館，不教柔術，不教空手道，只教柔道。這兩百人裡面，要有五歲的孩子，要有七十歲的老頭，也要有奧運冠軍。要同時做到，唯一的辦法是把教練分工，誰帶休閒，誰帶競技，課程徹底分開。

2012 年，這個願景兌現了。道館超過兩百人，生意跑起來了，Kayla Harrison 在倫敦拿了奧運金牌。

他把這件事講出來的重點不在"我成功了"。重點在於：這件事在他講出來的時候，全國沒有第二家做到。收費一百五十美元一個月、兩百人規模、只教柔道的道館，在當時不存在。他先是在腦子裡把它建成，然後才把它建成。

沒人比你更好，除非你允許

聊到信念，Pedro 說了一句很樸素但很重的話：

沒有人比你更好，沒有人，除非你自己允許。（Jimmy Pedro）

他的論據是人人平等這個最基礎的事實：我們出生的時候都不會走路、不會說話、什麼都不會，全靠後天學。那些做成大事的人，也是從同樣的起點開始的。人容易高估別人，同時把自己看低。

但他沒有把這套說成"想想就能成"。他專門講了社交媒體這一層：所有人都在網上看到別人成功的樣子，沒人發自己躺在地上失敗的照片，沒人發自己胳膊斷了、在家躺沙發上做康復、疼得睡不著的那幾個月。你看到的領獎臺照片，是那個人從谷底爬回來之後拍的。

每個人都有非常非常黑暗的時刻，有失敗、有挫折、有痛苦。只是等他們全部扛過去、重新爬上山、站到頂點之後，你才在社交媒體上看到他們掛著獎牌的樣子。（Jimmy Pedro）

至於"要不要有人相信你"，Pedro 的回答分兩層：有人相信你當然好，但第一推動力必須來自你自己。別人可以幫你定義方向、給你資源、給你連線、給你鼓勵，但那個起點只能是你自己的熱情、慾望和對自己的承諾。做犧牲的那個人最終是你，所以決定也必須是你的，不是父母的，不是配偶的。

Travis Stevens：把頭往牆上撞的人

Pedro 第一次真正注意到 Travis，是 2005 年在義大利。他帶了一個叫 U23 Elite 的專案，從全國挑了二十個孩子去參加一個歐洲的硬比賽。當時他對 Travis 一無所知，沒看過他訓練，沒看過他比賽。

Travis 那時候十七八歲，八十一公斤級。那站比賽很難，他贏了三場輸了兩場。

讓 Pedro 記住的不是勝負，是他在每一場裡都在死磕。他贏不了那些人，但他比那些人更想贏。還有一個細節：輸掉第二場被淘汰之後，他的失望是真實的，他真的覺得自己應該贏那些人。

Pedro 走過去跟他說，小子別難過，你路還長，你現在缺技術缺經驗，能打成這樣說明你有未來。然後他給朋友 Jason Morris 打了電話：你聽說過一個叫 Travis Stevens 的小孩嗎？那孩子身上有股狠勁。

Pedro 說 Travis 身上有一種特質：對他而言不存在"苦"這個概念。如果你告訴他，把頭撞穿牆就能贏，他會真的去撞。他恨輸超過愛贏，百分之百。輸了就懲罰自己，逼自己練得更狠，用自我折磨來回應失望。Pedro 帶過的所有頂級選手都有這個共性：寧可被車撞，也不願意輸一場柔道比賽。

這也解釋了 Travis 的傷病。他不太把傷病當問題。Lex 問過他後不後悔把身體逼到那個程度，他的回答是不後悔，現在更強了，因為該斷的都斷過了，長回來的更結實。Pedro 說這就是那個人，傷病在他那兒不是英雄敘事，就是工作的一部分，工作得完成。

Pedro 在那次訓練營開營時講過一段話，現在看像是給 Travis 量身定做的：

如果你受傷了，你不會坐在場邊拿著冰袋、跳過幾輪，然後第二天回到墊子上告訴我你沒事。你如果明天能練，你今天就能練。所以這裡沒有受傷這回事。唯一能讓你離開這個道館的，是救護車把你抬出去。（Jimmy Pedro）

後來在歐洲很多次，Pedro 會主動說：今天算了吧，纏一下，去邊上歇一天，你太累了。Travis 的回答永遠是：不行，師父，我自己纏，救護車沒來，這只是手腕，這只是腳踝。

另一個層面是減重。Pedro 說，他見過很多最硬的人在減重這一關被徹底擊垮。Travis 沒被擊垮，而且他常常是在極端條件下完成的。

他的做法近乎自虐：賽前從不稱體重，上飛機的時候可能超重九公斤，賽前三天落地才開始減。一天三練，早上起來練，吃飯，下午練，再吃，晚上再練，然後獎勵自己一罐激浪或者一塊巧克力，第二天早上又回到八十七公斤。直到稱重那天早上才真正踩上秤，達標狀態維持不超過五分鐘。

更狠的是行程安排。在巴黎打完比賽，一週雙練的訓練營，然後下一個週末接著打，再一週雙練，第三個週末再打。連續三四周在歐洲不停比賽、不停訓練營、不停減重。日本隊來巴黎打完就回國，德國隊跳過法國公開賽專門備戰德國站。美國隊到德國站的時候已經不是百分之百了，但 PedRo 說這就是他們要的經驗，是國內拿不到的。

等這些選手終於到了世錦賽或奧運會，身體是滿的，休息是足的。在德國站像怪物一樣的對手，到了那天感覺什麼都不是。

2012 年倫敦，Travis 沒拿到牌。Pedro 說那天的感覺像有人死了。對 Ole Bischoff 那場半決賽，打了二十多分鐘，實際纏鬥十分鐘，Travis 把身上所有東西都留在墊子上了。他想進決賽，他想拿金牌，機會沒了之後他整個人塌了，哭了四十五分鐘，Pedro 拉不起來他。Pedro 說你別哭了，我們還有銅牌戰，你這樣恢復不過來。他不在乎。金牌或者什麼都沒有。

銅牌戰他輸了。同一個加拿大對手，他此前幾乎每場都贏。那天他身上的火已經燒完了。

而那屆奧運會，他的好朋友 Martyn Malloy 拿了銅牌，第二天 Kayla 拿了美國柔道史上第一塊女子金牌。訓練夥伴拿金牌，發小拿銅牌，他什麼都沒有。

接下來四年，他要面對的不只是訓練。每一次記者來道館，都想採訪 Kayla，她是奧運冠軍，Travis 是誰？沒拿牌，不重要。小孩子看到 Kayla 的獎牌會問：Travis 你也去奧運會了？你的牌呢？你打得怎麼樣？他只能說我第五。這種提醒每天都在。

所以 2016 年裡約，Pedro 說那是他見過最強、狀態最好的 Travis。賽前在墊子上做防守練習，Pedro 親自上，感覺那人的力量前所未有。比賽當天早上，Pedro 看著他的眼睛問，你今天準備好了嗎。Travis 說：我今天要讓全世界震驚。

到了場館，所有選手都在緊張地做打込（Uchi Komi），汗都出來了，身上全是焦慮的能量。Travis 戴著大耳機，穿著印著 USA 的背心，穿著在暗處會發光的美國隊泳褲，在熱身區晃來晃去，跳著舞，像個被爸爸放到遊樂園裡的小孩。他等了四年就等這一刻，放鬆得可怕，像籠子裡放出來的老虎。

半決賽他贏了當時八十一公斤級世界第一、世界冠軍、喬治亞代表團旗手 Avtandili Tchrikishvili，用絞技終結。Pedro 說全場除了美國隊，沒有一個人認為 Travis 會贏。那個人以前一分鐘內就把他摔崩過，根本不算一場比賽。這次他們準備了一套完整的戰術，Travis 執行得乾乾淨淨。

那塊銀牌，Pedro 用的詞是"錦上添花"。因為 Kayla 已經拿了第二塊金牌，那是美國柔道史上最好的一屆成績。

Kayla Harrison：從零自尊到兩屆奧運冠軍

談 Kayla，繞不開她早年遭遇的性侵。Pedro 講這一段的時候沒有迴避：她當時自尊為零，自我價值為零，處在最低谷，甚至不想活在這個世上。她需要正確的幫助，需要身邊有一群能陪她走過去的人，需要不斷被確認"你沒有錯，你做了對的決定，你不該有一點愧疚"。

Pedro 反覆強調的一句話是：那件事發生在她身上，但不定義她。定義她的是她從現在開始做什麼。

而重建一個人，靠的是一整套系統。她十五歲來到這裡，Pedro 給她配了很好的體能教練，做全套奧運式舉重，身體在發育的同時每天都在變強。那時候 Pedro 自己還年輕，體重跟她接近，能上墊子陪練，Travis 也能陪她練，全國最好的男選手當時都在這個道館。她每晚、每週、每年都在跟能給出的最高強度對抗。技術、力量、對抗、再加上父親給她做體能和戰術，幾層疊起來。

還有一個關鍵決策：體重級別。

她剛來的時候打六十三公斤，一百三十八磅，減得很痛苦。當時 Ronda Rousey 也在這裡訓練，打七十公斤。正常思路是往上走一級，但那一級正好是 Ronda 的地盤。

她父親的方案是：直接跳兩級，打七十八公斤。

她當時的反應是：那是一百七十二磅。她父親的回答很粗暴：你已經在一百三十八磅上掙扎了，你現在一百五十磅，有什麼區別？加二十磅，去一百七。

Pedro 說這個判斷很聰明。減重減得太狠、太久的人，會把注意力全放在體重上，訓練永遠疲憊，出不了全力，技術停止進步。跳到七十八公斤，她可以專心變強、變大、變壯，用幾年時間"長"進這個級別，然後在這個級別裡學會統治。她後來確實統治了。

另一個故事發生在 2010 年 1 月，紐約布魯克林，一個叫 Starret Cup 的地方賽。Pedro 知道有兩個加拿大選手會來，世界排名十五到二十，不是超級明星，但很硬。他跟 Kayla 說，去打，去拿經驗，回來我們再補課。

那個級別只有三個人，她和兩個加拿大人。她兩場全輸。

那是 2010 年 1 月。她當時已經是世青賽冠軍。輸完之後她明白了一件事：成年組是另一個層級。

十個月後，2010 年 10 月，東京世錦賽，她拿了冠軍。在柔道的祖國，日本。

所有人都看得到冠軍最高光的時刻，看不到他們糟糕的日子。你能想象嗎，零勝兩負，你覺得自己是個失敗者。但十個月之後，她在東京成了世界冠軍。（Jimmy Pedro）

Pedro 說這件事能發生，前提是你把失敗放回它該在的位置上，不讓它從心理上摧毀你，然後繼續往前走。

第三個故事更能說明教練這份工作到底是什麼。

2015 年東京大滿貫，是里約奧運前最後一站硬比賽。Kayla 當時幾乎贏遍了同級別所有強手，只有一個日本選手她很久沒打，上一次交手是輸的。Pedro 想讓她在奧運前把這個人也贏一遍，這樣她心裡就沒有任何一個人是"我打不過"。

賽前她落枕了，頸部神經被壓，疼。她沒跟 Pedro 說，去找了隊醫，繞著場地走，手一直扶著脖子。

隊醫來找 Pedro 和父親：我覺得她今天不該打。

Pedro 的回答是：你的意見其實不太重要吧。

然後他問了一個關鍵問題：她是有受傷風險，還是隻是疼？隊醫說沒有受傷風險，只是神經受壓，會疼。

Pedro 說，那你能處理疼痛嗎？隊醫說能，打一針就不疼了。

Pedro 說，那就打。

Kayla 過來問：隊醫不是跟你們說了嗎？Pedro 說是啊，說了，我們聊過了，他說你可以打。她一臉不可置信。然後 Pedro 和父親跟她講清楚：你沒有受傷，你只是疼，因為我們剛從訓練營出來。但今天我們必須讓這個人上場，必須贏她。這是奧運前最後一站硬比賽，我們就是為這個來的。

她聽懂了。一針下去，上場，贏。整站比賽打完，拿了金牌。全世界都覺得他們瘋了，讓一個脖子有傷的選手上場。

Pedro 說，這件事的意義不只是贏了一塊金牌。它告訴運動員：你在不是百分之百的狀態下、身體疲憊、心理也疲憊的時候，還能贏這些人。那你狀態滿格的時候，會發生什麼？

到里約的時候，那個級別裡沒有一個選手認為自己能贏 Kayla。她們看著她，心裡想的是：不行，不可能。

金牌之後的空

Kayla 拿到第二塊奧運金牌之後，陷入了抑鬱。

Pedro 的解釋拆成幾塊，每一塊都很具體。

第一塊是目標的消失。你每天早上醒來都知道自己要幹什麼，為什麼幹，一整套日程排得滿滿的。然後你贏了，你拿到了所有的名聲，所有人都祝賀你。第二天早上醒來，你問自己：現在呢？我沒有下一個了。

第二塊是體系的真空。日本、法國這些柔道強國，奧運冠軍退役之後有安排：協會給職位，IJF 給你大使身份，讓你去學校教孩子，讓你代表女子體育到處飛，有薪水，有身份。Kayla 什麼都沒有。沒有人跟她說"接下來你這樣走"。

第三塊最現實：錢斷了。你一宣佈退役，美國柔道協會的工資就沒了，當時大概是每年七萬二千美元。奧委會的津貼沒了。贊助商也沒法繼續給錢，因為你不代表他們比賽了。紐約運動俱樂部多年來一直是她的贊助方，Pedro 在她十五歲時就跟對方說，這姑娘以後會很厲害，你們現在投她，我保證她會回報你們。她拿金牌那天，Pedro 打電話過去說，我早說過了吧。但退役之後，這筆錢也沒了。柔道在美國是個冷門專案，電視廣告、商業代言，一樣都沒有。奧運金牌的一次性獎金兩萬五千美元左右，靠這個活不下去。

沒有目標，沒有身份，沒有收入。三樣一起消失，人當然會往下掉。

Pedro 提到一個細節：東京奧運會期間有人採訪他，問 Kayla 會不會打下一屆。他說不會。為什麼？她已經是兩屆冠軍了，第三屆對她沒有任何意義，不能激勵她。又問會不會去打 MMA，他說不會，為什麼要去？她應該能靠自己在這項運動裡取得的成就養活自己一輩子。

後來她的生活找到了新的重心：她收養了自己姐姐的孩子，成為法定監護人，把這幾個孩子帶成自己的家人。這是她現在的目標。

關於 Khabib 那個問題

Lex 挑了個事：Kayla 說過她能在柔道規則下贏 Khabib Nurmagomedov，你怎麼看。

Pedro 的回答很有分寸。他先說自己不知道 Khabib 的柔道水平到底在什麼段位。然後他說，俄羅斯那套體系對柔道極其尊重。

但接著他給了判斷：他跟 Kayla 一起訓練過，他自己是奧運獎牌得主和世界冠軍，雖然那時候年紀大了，但他是男人，他必須全力上，否則會被她摔飛。如果 Khabib 不怎麼練純柔道，不理解抓把，那他可以摔，但如果他不懂高水平柔道的運作方式，她會在純柔道比賽裡贏他。不是 MMA，不是摔跤，不是降服賽，是純柔道，不許抓腿、必須抓把、只能靠摔。

Pedro 說他見過 Kayla 把美國最好的青年男子選手挨個摔穿，那些人在成年全國賽上拿過牌。她不會這樣對 Travis，不會這樣對一個成年全國冠軍或者奧運選手，但除此之外的男黑帶，她能正面對抗。

日本人練十五輪，歐洲人練八輪就沒勁了

關於 randori（自由對練），Pedro 的分類很清楚。

日本風格就是那種"兩個穿睡衣的人在動"的狀態：最小用力，最大效率，靠時機、靠手感、靠細膩的技術，摔得乾淨漂亮。在日本，一晚上打十五輪、每輪五分鐘，七十五分鐘連續對練，可以撐下來。會累，會被摔很多次，但整體是流暢的、自由的、技術的。

到了歐洲，同樣一晚上打八輪就很難。因為每一輪都在拼抓把、拼力量、拼對抗，體能消耗完全不是一個量級。八輪下來人是被抽乾的。

俄羅斯又不一樣：更多主動的、序列化的動作訓練，randori 輪數比法國、德國少得多。

美國的問題是人少。Pedro 說得很直白：一晚上你也許只有兩個能給你高質量回合的夥伴，那這兩個人各打兩次，你只有四個好回合，剩下的回合沒人把你逼到極限。所以美國隊換了訓練方法。

這個辦法叫"鯊魚餌"（shark bait）。備戰期道館裡可能總共只有二十個人，其中四個跟 Travis 一個量級，跟 Kayla 同級別的女生可能只有一個，她只能跟男的練，剩下的都是太弱的青少年。於是他們把能構成挑戰的四五個人排成一隊，一人一分鐘，連著五分鐘，每個人都在那一分鐘裡用盡全力。一個人跟 Travis 打一分鐘能全力，打五分鐘不可能。這樣一輪下來，Travis 拿到了五分鐘的高強度對抗，而陪練的人只消耗了一分鐘。換一批，再來。一晚上重複六到八次，主力選手拿到四十分鐘的極限對抗。

主投技只有一個，但同一個把位要有整個軍火庫

Lex 問了一個技術問題：是專精一個投技、把它練到世界第一更好，還是會很多種更好。

Pedro 的答案是有主次。Travis 的主投技是揹負投（Ippon Seoi Nage），Kayla 是大腰（O Goshi），他自己是體落。但每一個主投技都掛著一整套變招，而且是從同一個把位發動的。Travis 抓起那個把位，來的可能是揹負投，可能是小內掛，可能是揹負投接大外刈。對手永遠在猜。

因為在高水平賽場上，你只有一個技術，除了極少數例外，全世界很快就會研究出怎麼破你。

但他也同意 Lex 的另一半觀點：主投技本身的打磨不能停。每天都要扔，在墊上扔，移動中扔，爆發式地扔，練到細節層面。這不是可以"學會了就放著"的東西。

古賀稔彥就是例子。他那記動態揹負投好多年沒人擋得住。後來對手開始用非正規打法，繞到他背後，交叉抓把，不讓他拿到襟，他拿不到把位就出不了招。於是他加了袖釣，加了大外，加了巴投，把軍火庫擴了。但只要他拿到那個把位，他的揹負投還是沒人防得住。

至於 Travis 和古賀那種"分腿"（split hip）揹負投，Pedro 說這是他自己從小練的東西，他父親教過他，現在道館裡也在教小孩。這個版本比基礎版難學，但一進身，對手兩隻腳同時離地，人已經被架住了，剩下的只是鎖住、轉身、砸下去。不是傳統那種"讓位給對手"的摔法，是把人整個抱起來砸。

抓把才是大多數人真正缺的那一課

聊到業餘選手怎麼提高，Pedro 先分了兩類人。

第一類是想學好柔道但不打算比賽的人。他說美國在這類學員上投入太少，所有人都被推去比賽。實際上有一大群成年人想學柔道、想學到能用，但不想被扔進 randori。道館應該有這樣一套課程。他的道館就有：休閒班完全不安排 randori，課後想留下練十五到三十分鐘自由對練的可以留，多數人不留，因為那一小時技術課已經讓人全身溼透。

他有一個判斷：如果你技術學得好，動作、時機、手感都對，你會比那些只靠蠻力打 randori、動作變形的人更強，身體也會很好，因為摔人本身是極耗體力的全身運動。

第二類是想比賽的人。對這類人，Pedro 說必須先有抓把體系。

很多時候教練會說，去抓把，隨便抓一個。但有時候你抓了把，你的處境比不抓還糟。因為你如果用錯誤的方式抓住道服，對手能攻你，你攻不了他。那你為什麼要抓這個把？（Jimmy Pedro）

這也是很多從柔術轉過來的人最直接的挫敗感：跟黑帶打的時候，你感覺自己根本沒在打柔道。對方拿到某個把位之後，你什麼都做不了，連輸都輸得莫名其妙，因為你壓根沒進場。

Pedro 說這就是抓把的價值：它決定了你能發動什麼進攻，也決定了對手能不能發動進攻。你不需要每一秒都壓制對方的把位，但你必須理解把位和投技之間的對應關係，否則你等於沒上場。

青少年必須去歐洲和日本

回到從零到奧運的路線圖，Pedro 說青少年階段除了比賽量，還有一件事不能省：出國。

必須去歐洲，因為要感受那種身體對抗。歐洲人抓把的方式完全不同，會把你拖進各種非正規的位置，你沒見過就等不到出招就被摔了。這種適應只能靠實戰堆出來。

也必須去日本，因為要感受那種流動的技術柔道，把技術底子打厚。

Pedro 自己就是被父親這樣送出去的。他父親跟他說：我能教你的到此為止了，你去下一層。然後把他送到了英國的 Neil Adams 那兒。

Neil Adams 是奧運銀牌得主、世界冠軍，地面技術極強，抓把很硬，而且主投技正好也是體落。Pedro 前後去了英國八九次，在考文垂的俱樂部長期訓練。

那邊的日程是這樣的：早上七點到俱樂部，先出去跑，跑山、五英里、公園衝刺、扛人；九點和 Adams 上技術課，一個半小時純技術，不打 randori，全是序列化的動作重複，兩三個鋪墊動作接主攻動作，地面也是一樣；下午自己練力量；晚上要麼在俱樂部打 randori，要麼一車人開一個小時去另一家道館，那邊有五十個人可以練。每晚換一個地方。這樣連著三週，只訓練。

Pedro 說 Adams 教了他柔道十字絞（Juji Gatame）的做法，就是他現在用的那個版本。

關於 Adams 後來成為"柔道之聲"，Pedro 的解釋是：這個人本來就極具魅力，熱情、嗓門大、愛開玩笑，英國人天生幽默。他退役後試過執教，帶過威爾士，也在別的國家待過，但沒能帶出奧運冠軍。他教技術非常強， Pedro 就是受益者，但運營一支隊伍、管理一群不那麼投入的運動員，不是他的長處。Pedro 說自己跟他合得來，是因為他當年是"全押"的狀態：去了之後，Adams 說什麼他就做什麼，不管多苦多長，只想變得更強。

至於解說，Pedro 說這個人極度鑽研，不停研究，加上那把聲音和把比賽講活的表達能力，就成了今天的他。

那些比賽影像被鎖起來了

節目裡有一段跑題的對話，但我覺得是整期最讓人難受的部分。

Lex 說他上傳 Travis 那期節目，裡面只用了一分鐘，是他和 Travis 一起看 2012 年對 Ole Bischoff 那場的技術回放，畫中畫的小窗。整期四小時的對話被 YouTube 立即下架，因為 IOC 把那段影片上傳了，設成了私密。

不是要收費，是根本不給你看。

Teddy Riner 東京那場失利，網上找不到。Usain Bolt 的很多比賽，找不到完整版。東京奧運會男子百米，義大利人奪冠那場，據他所知只有集錦。

Pedro 講了自己的經歷。他剛退役時拍了一部片子叫《Fury on the Mat》，講自己的故事，找了個做攝像的朋友，翻出一堆舊素材和奧運素材。有人告訴他不能用奧運畫面。他說那不是我朋友自己拿攝像機拍的嗎，是我的素材。對方說，只要涉及奧運會，版權就是美國奧委會的。他把片子送過去審，回來一張單子：想用這幾分鐘素材，三萬美金。他來回談，最後付了一萬五，才在關於自己的片子裡用上幾分鐘自己的畫面。

如果沒有我在裡面比賽，你根本不會有這段影像。（Jimmy Pedro）

Pedro 把原因歸到電視轉播權上：NBC 和各國轉播商付了數十億美金，他們決定了什麼能重播、什麼不能。Lex 的看法是，這不只是貪婪，也是無能：他們不是不擅長賺錢，是連賺錢都不擅長。十年前的比賽影片在 YouTube 上還有幾億播放量，重播市場明擺著在那兒，只是沒人去做。

Pedro 說，這件事的代價是歷史被抹掉。一項運動所有神奇的瞬間，都鎖在某個私密連結裡。他說這很可惜，甚至用了"罪過"這個詞。

柔道給小孩，柔術給成年人

聊到柔道和巴西柔術的比較，Pedro 講得很實際。

柔道對成年人是一項很難入門的運動。他舉了個例子：除了柔道，你這輩子什麼時候做過前滾翻？大概小學。大多數人每天在電腦前坐八到十小時，最近一次運動可能是高中。一個三十五、四十歲的人想開始一項運動，柔道門檻太高，尤其是現在的道館大多沒有成人休閒課程，一節課一個半小時一刀切，新人扛不住。

柔術對這類人更合適：自衛性強，需要動腦，小個子可以靠技術，教的很多東西跟柔道相通，而且安全係數更高。再加上 UFC 和 MMA 帶來的主流認知，練柔術的人在社交場合有身份、有話題，道館文化也更像家庭，有歸屬感。這就是它增長快的原因。

柔道更適合孩子。Pedro 說它更立體、更有趣、互動性更強，教孩子摔投更安全，孩子的身體恢復能力也比成年人強，不容易受傷。所以他的判斷是：柔道從兒童到高中、大學都能長，柔術從十八歲往上開始長。如果一家柔道館想活得好，必須補上成人休閒基礎課這一塊，讓成年人來學動作，但不被推進 randori，不被扔進自己控制不了的場面。

把熱愛變成飯碗

Pedro 是布朗大學畢業的，談人生建議時，他講了自己的一段經歷。

他曾經在 monster.com 做網路營銷，早上八點坐到下午五點，然後六點到九點去練柔道。一天全被佔滿，白天在做自己完全不投入的事。

是他妻子 Marie 說的那句話改變了他的路徑：如果你能想清楚怎麼只靠武術養活自己，讓你的腦子、你的心、你的熱情全朝著一個方向，你會成功。

他辭了職。那時候他有三個孩子。

他給年輕人的建議是這幾點：找一件你熱愛的事，熱愛到不覺得是工作；如果這條路不存在，就自己造一條出來；別讓任何人告訴你不行。他說自己當年不知道一家只教柔道、兩百人規模、按柔術價位收費的道館能不能存在，因為全國沒有先例。他做出來了。

還有兩點他反覆強調。

第一，要願意承認自己不懂，然後去學。他的道館卡在六十人那幾年，他花錢請顧問進來看，問"我做錯了什麼，從外面看你能看到什麼"，聽完就改。他說願意改變、願意適應，這件事本身就是能力。

第二，要幫別人。有人來找他說想開道館、想辦比賽、想把這件事做起來，他會想辦法幫對方做成。因為如果那是別人真正的夢想，而他幫著實現了一次，那個人會記一輩子，會成為他生意最好的代言人。他教過的孩子、跟他幹過的人、合作過的客戶、當年辦比賽來找他借一整套墊子的 Brian Simmons、Gracie 家的人，最後都成了家人一樣的關係。

他說，還有一條：說到做到。

節目最後有一段很動人的對話。Lex 說他們很多年前見過一次，那次他還沒什麼名氣，Pedro 不知道他是誰，就把他當一個人對待，讓他進道館，坐下來聊了一期節目。那天是 Lex 去 MIT 之前的最後一次對話，Pedro 跟他說"你做得很好"。那句話他記了很多年，因為那時候沒什麼人這麼跟他說。

Pedro 說那句話是真的。奧運週期前後，來找他的記者很多，很多人唸錯他的名字，搞錯他的背景，或者提前五分鐘打電話說抱歉要晚到一個半小時。而 Lex 帶著準備好的筆記來，瞭解他的全部歷史，問題是想過的、有質量的。所以他真心想告訴這個年輕人，你做得很好，你跟其他人不一樣。

善意是有回報的，哪怕當時看不出路徑。

如果這篇你只記一件事

這期播客講了兩個多小時，落在實操層面的東西其實不多，但每一條都能馬上用。下面這幾條，是我聽完之後覺得最值得抄下來照做的。

  • 先把目標寫到紙上。不是"我想變強"，是具體到可驗證的節點：全國冠軍、世界隊、世界獎牌、奧運。寫完簽字。目標要拉伸，但不能是白日夢，夠不著的東西大腦不會信，不信就不會為你調動資源。
  • 每天花幾分鐘，把關鍵那一天從頭到尾活一遍。從起床、稱重、吃早飯、上大巴、進場、熱身、第一場，一直演到結束。要演感官：抓道服的手感、汗流下來的觸感、場館的氣味、手指纏膠布的感覺。別用第三人稱看自己，要進到身體裡去。
  • 檢查一下你是恨輸更多，還是愛贏更多。Pedro 的判斷很硬：冠軍是恨輸更多的那一類。如果你的金牌和銅牌一大堆、銀牌極少，說明燈光亮起來的時候你能站住；如果銀牌一堆，說明你在最後一步會軟。
  • 如果你的專案有"把位"這個概念，先去補它。柔道的抓把、柔術的 guard 爭奪、拳擊的距離控制，都屬同一類東西。錯誤的把位不是中性狀態，是負資產。很多人不是技術不夠，是從來沒進過場。
  • 把主技術練到不能再細，同時在同一個起始姿勢下再練兩到三個變招。一個技術在高水平賽場撐不了太久，全世界都會研究你。但主技術不能因為"已經會了"就放下，每天都要扔。
  • 如果你是教練或者帶人的人，先分清"疼"和"傷"。疼可以處理，傷必須停。Pedro 讓 Kayla 那次上場，前提是他問過隊醫有沒有受傷風險，答案是"沒有，只是神經壓迫的疼"。這個區分弄反了，就是拿人換成績。
  • 失敗之後，把它放回它該在的位置。2010 年 1 月，Kayla 在布魯克林的一個地方賽上零勝兩負。十個月後她在東京成了世界冠軍。中間隔的不是奇蹟，是不讓那兩場失敗定義自己。
  • 如果你想把熱愛變成職業，先找懂行的人來罵你的生意。Pedro 的道館卡在六十人，是花錢請顧問進來看才破的局。他聽到的兩句話是"這地方太嚇人"和"一節課一個半小時新人扛不住"。這兩句話值兩百個學員。

最後說一句題外話。Pedro 講 1996 年亞特蘭大那場銅牌戰，講到全場喊 USA 的時候，他說自己現在還在起雞皮疙瘩。

那不是修辭。他講的時候真的起了。

一個人把一件事想到那個程度、練到那個程度、活到那個程度，二十五年後描述起來，身體還會回到那個墊子上。所謂冠軍的鍛造，大概就是這個樣子。

文稿來自公開 Kaggle 資料集（rajneesh231/lex-fridman-podcast-transcript），為早期自動轉錄存檔，可能存在識別錯誤。
The following is a conversation with Jimmy Pedro, a legendary judo competitor and coach. He represented the United States at four Olympics in 92, 96, 2000, and 2004, winning a bronze medal at two of them. He medaled in three world championships, winning gold in 1999. He has coached many of the elite level American judoka, including Kayla Harrison, Ronda Rousey, Travis Stevens, and many others. Plus, he's now my judo coach, along with Travis Stevens. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Jimmy Pedro. What is the most beautiful throw in judo to you? I think Uchi Mata. You know, it's the one that seems to have the most amplitude. That person goes the highest, you see a leg swing through the middle, the person doing the throw, there's a leg swinging through the middle, the other person definitely goes, you know, head over heels, flat on their back. It's probably the most dynamic, pretty judo throw there is. Okay, so it's a single, you're standing on a single foot and you're raising your other foot in the air and it's a forward throw, which means the, your back is facing the opponent, but they kind of both fly through the air and twist through the air. Correct. Yeah, so how does that throw work? What are the principles behind that throw? Is one of those throws that, you know, people can kind of understand how to pick up another human being in sort of trivial ways, but the Uchi Mata to me never quite made sense, like why it works. There's a cork, there's a twisting motion, there's some involvement of the hip, but not, it's not really a hip throw because the hip is not all the way over, so it's not, it's a very confusing throw to me. So I'm trying to say, can you say something through words? It's probably one of the most difficult throws to learn as well, because it is so complex. You do have to stand on one leg, balance on one leg, you know, swing your other leg through the middle, hold your opponent up in the air, and it's hard to, it's hard to make that contact with upper body to your back. You know, you have to turn your back on the throw as well. So how does it work? It's definitely sort of a throw where you need to start pulling your opponent's upper body towards you, right? So their upper body starts coming towards you. Your legs go towards them as your body starts to go into the throw. So your head is gonna go left, let's say, your body, your legs are gonna go to the right, your body's, your partner's gonna start to lean towards you. And just as you start to get there, momentum coming forward, your leg is gonna sweep up underneath theirs, pick them up onto your hip, right, and then the finish of the throw is a twist. And a lot of times, the good judoka will leave their feet when they do the throw, so both bodies are in the air together, and then the thrower comes down on top of the person being thrown. So all four feet are in the air. Correct. So there's just this unstoppable force that's, so you're all in the air. You're basically doing a roll together. Correct. Okay, so who, to you, is the best uchimata, who has, besides yourself, the... I'm not gonna lie, there's plenty of guys that do uchimata a lot better than I do. You do have a nice video about the uchimata online, but who is a great practitioner of the uchimata to you? Right now, Shohei Ono, who's two time Olympic gold medalist, that's his favorite throw, and there's tons of highlight videos on the IGF and judo fanatics showing how he does his uchimata, and it is quite different than everybody else's, but it's unstoppable. When he comes in, nobody stops it. He's won two golds in a row at the Olympics. I think maybe in the last eight years, the guy's lost two matches. He's just incredible. At a very competitive division, I guess 73 kilos? Okay, and then three time world champ too. Is he the greatest of all time to you? The only reason why he's not is because Nomura is a 60 kilo player. He was three time Olympic champion, so Nomura, I mean, unless Ono's gonna stick around for another three years and win again here in Paris, then he'd match what Nomura did, but three time gold medalist in judo in a lightweight division, that's pretty spectacular. So to you, being able to win a championship, world championship, or Olympic medal is a measure of greatness. It's not like you have some people who are not as accomplished like Koga or something like that, but just the beauty, the moments of magic, the number of moments of magic is the highest, even if it's not championships. I think you have to go by that because there's so many phenomenal judo players that have come through the system of spectacular judo. You have won countless major events, but the ability to pull it together, those magical moments, the pinnacle of the sport, the world championships, the Olympic games, and proving that you can do it time and time again makes you unstoppable, it makes you the best. There was a guy back in the 70s and 80s by the name of Fuji and he won four world championships back to back. And back then, the Worlds was every two years. So here he was, a four time world champion. That's eight years the top of the sport. He never won an Olympic medal. He never went to the Olympics. So there's a guy who missed out on Olympic greatness, but was arguably the best competitor back in that period. By the way, same Fuji as Fuji? Right. Really, okay. Wow, I didn't know there was an actual guy, Fuji. Our brand is named after the mountain, Mount Fuji. But this is a different guy, his name was Fuji. All right, well, history rhymes. What about Teddy Renier? 10 time world champ, I think, two time gold medalist at the Olympics, two times bronze medalist at the Olympics. Probably the most dominant judoka ever. Is he in the running? What do you think about that guy? I think he's a freak of nature, Teddy. If you look at the size, just how tall he is, how big he is, how physical he is of a specimen. I sat next to him on a bus, and his legs are literally the size of my waist. When you sit next to him and just look at the size, he's a big man. So obviously to win 10 world titles in the sport of judo, I mean, that's almost an incomprehensible feat, two time Olympic champion, again, that puts him in one of the maybe 10 or 12 people to ever do that in the history of the sport. So he's definitely got to be in the running for the best. But technically, I don't think he's as technical as some of the other, in terms of pure judo finesse technique. He's powerful, he's explosive, he's dominant, he's strong. Teddy also grips really, really well, which makes him that much tougher to beat. Because a lot of times heavyweights, especially in the heavyweight division, a lot of them just grab the gi and they go man to man and judo to judo and take shots at each other. And that's why a lot of them end up getting beat. But Teddy's in control, like positionally, he stays in really good position and he controls his opponent the whole fight. So they really don't have a chance against them. He doesn't give them a chance to beat him, which is why he's been so dominant. But he's not really stalling. So I mean, he does have a really nice Osorogari, this backward trip, outside trip, in case people don't know. And he has just like technically pretty good throws for heavyweight. Heavyweights can be sometimes messy with their judo. He's pretty technical and clean in the execution of his big throws. But a lot of that probably has to do with the dominant gripping that he does. It's not defensive gripping, it's offensive gripping, but the dominant gripping. 100%. He controls the grips, he controls the movement of the match as a result of that, and then he creates his own openings. So I mean, for a heavyweight, phenomenal technique, yes. And what you said, messy, I'd like to call it sloppy, right? A lot of the heavyweights tend to be sloppy. They're falling on the ground a lot. It's hard to move somebody that weighs 350 pounds. It's hard to get that body moving and just with a simple pull motion. So he's definitely found a way to do it. But he's also, I don't know, six foot eight. He probably weighs 140 kilos. He's a big boy. But he had this winning streak of just, I don't know how long, but like over 100 matches. And he lost at this Olympics that we just went through, the 20, I don't even know what to call it, 2021 Olympics. I don't know the proper terminology. Tokyo 2020 is what they call it. Tokyo 2020, all right. So he lost to Tamerlan Bashev. I mean, it's always sad to see a sort of greatness come to an end. It's like Karelin in wrestling and Greco Roman. Did you shed a bit of a tear to see greatness go? Or is it just the way of life? I mean, what did you think about sort of this dominance, this run of dominance being stopped? I think, I mean, it's obviously sad to see LFC and champions succeed, especially people that are good people. And I think Teddy's a good person. I mean, I think there's some arrogant champions that everybody would like to see lose just because they don't wanna deal with their personality. But I think Teddy's a very humble champion. He's a people's champion. You know, I think he's been privileged and he makes good money from the sport of judo and the French Federation has taken care of him well. So he's a lifelong judo icon. So it's sad to see somebody like that get beat, especially when this could have been his third Olympic title and just put him in infamy. So it was sad to see, but I think, you know, every athlete goes through it, right? I mean, it's just, that's what the Olympics is all about. The great ones fall sometimes and. Especially in judo, it's like so, like the margin of error. I mean, I guess the other question I wanna ask here is, in your sense, how difficult it is to not lose for so long? It seems like in judo, like a little mistake and it's over. There's no coming back and Ippon means it's over. So how difficult is that? It's hard to stay that dominant without question. First of all, when you are the entire world is training against you just to beat you. They're studying every single movement. They're studying patterns. They're trying to break it down and find a flaw in your game. So everybody's hunting for you when you're the best in the world, especially at the Olympics. That's the one to beat you at. So everybody's focused on you. And then there's an incredible amount of pressure on that athlete to perform. You carry the flag for your country when you're at opening ceremonies sometimes. There's all spotlight is on you. And it's particularly hard when things don't go well early. In other words, when you're expected to win and then all of a sudden now you're in a hard fight and it's not going the way you want, that pressure, the one who's the favorite feels the pressure the most at the Olympics. And that's why I think the other ones are able to win it. I've actually never gotten a chance to listen to Teddy Renner sort of explain ideas behind his Judo. Like I wonder what his mental game is like because I think his English is pretty, not very good. And so, and I just haven't seen good interviews, but it's always fascinating to, there's certain great athletes that are also great thinkers and speakers, like the Satya brothers in wrestling. Again, not meaning, that's on my to do list, 100%, I'm going to Dagestan and talking to them because they're brilliant. But to be able to sort of, maybe after retirement, to think back, what were the systems involved? Both on the technical, the training side, and then the mental side. Because to stay that dominant, just like you're saying, everybody's studying to beat you. And the heavyweights are just these powerful dudes. So to be able to control them with your game and the game that everybody knows is coming is, I don't know, I don't know what's behind that, but there's got to be, it feels like the mental game is exceptionally important. I think a lot of people underestimate just how important that side is. Being mentally prepared for victory, mentally prepared to be the best, to stay the best. There's no way that's weak minded that they can accomplish that. It's 100% confidence and belief in yourself. If we take a big picture view then, not necessarily Taylor Renner, but if you want to go from the very beginning, from day one of judo class to Olympic champion or Olympic medalist, what does it take to become an Olympic medalist in judo from start to finish? Like how many different trajectories do you see? Or is there some unifying principles? I think a lot of it has to, your journey is gonna depend a lot by where you're from. So a path that an American might take versus somebody who's from Japan or somebody who's from Europe. There's two very, three very distinct paths, right? Because in Japan, it's part of the culture. There's a system of excellence. There's elementary school judo, there's junior high school, there's high school, there's collegiate, there's Olympic and much like our wrestling is here in the United States, right? It's very similar, there's youth wrestling, there's high school, there's NCAA and then there's Olympic wrestling. And when your country is a factory of producing athletes at the highest level, then all of those top athletes typically go back into the sport and there's professions for them. They have an opportunity to coach at all those different levels. And just the level of their game and the expertise that all of them have, even down at the elementary level, make their skill so solid. And as a coach, in that situation, you can just sit back and watch who stands out as opposed to, I think in America, I guess, you would need to craft. You don't get to choose from a thousand people, a few people that naturally stand out at the age of nine. You have to actually, whatever the natural resources you're given, craft them into a champion. So if we look at that, the American way, where you just have a person with a smile show up to your dojo, says I want to be an Olympic medalist, what process do you take them through? The odds are really insurmountable. It's a very, very high hill to climb. And there's only a few, there's only a few people and there's only a few coaches in this entire country that really understand that process and that can help people reach that level, as it's been proven, right? Yeah. Number one, you certainly have to have a solid base, a fundamental base of an expectation of what the training is gonna be. And it has to be a level of professionalism very, very early, where you're teaching all the basic judo moves, all the basic fundamental movements, posture, gripping. Well, maybe gripping doesn't come in so early in the game, but throwing methodology, movements, niwaza position, standing fundamental throws. And I think most importantly is really the work ethic, just the way you're gonna train, the intensity you're gonna train with, the ability to, mindset of going to tournaments constantly. In order to compete with the rest of the world, our young kids need to be tested a lot when they're young. They have to be put through adversity because they don't get put through adversity in training because you don't have that many good training partners. So you get put through adversity in competition and then we see what your weaknesses are and we continue to make improvements on those. But the journey is, it's long. And until they're kind of at the teenage years, they're gonna have to pretty much stay domestic, right? Cause they gotta go through life as a normal kid, but they've gotta be training in the dojo at least, five days a week. Sometimes they might wanna get an extra technical workout in or doing some base conditioning in addition to that. And then really at the teenage years, that's where we really, we've struggled in America of keeping teens in the sport of Judo as well as developing them properly. Cause up until around the teenage years, I think the Americans are on par with the rest of the world in terms of technique and in terms of skill and we've proven we can compete with the rest of the world up until that age. But that's where Japan and that's where the Europeans and the countries that are strong in Judo, that's where they put a lot of time, energy and effort is it to the teens where they have a great coaching staff, they have good training camps with 800, a thousand people going to them every single weekend. When you say teens, what do you mean? Do you mean literally like 13? Yeah, age 13 to 17, 13 to 19. And that's where you really accelerate your development. So you're saying like in America, when you're young, like before nine, 10, 11, 12, you stick in Judo, you can progress quite a bit. But then I guess the other competition there, if you're into two people doing stuff to each other in a combative way, the other competitor in America is wrestling. So Judo almost primes you, like it teaches you how to be a great wrestler as well. And so then you have to have a hard decision because you can probably be a collegiate wrestler. You have like a clear plan of where you're going to go if you wanna be a wrestler. With Judo, that plan is less clear. So you have to be on your own a bit with your coach, that kind of thing. Exactly. Okay, so when you're on your own with your coach, to me, that's just a fascinating journey because then it's just like the purity of it. It's the coach and the athlete and the dream. It's all about the dedication, the five, six, seven days a week competing, what, once a month, twice a month. Okay, but also, you probably don't have that conversation. I don't know if you do. Maybe you do, saying like, we're gonna do this for the next eight years. Right. Do you ever sit down? Would you just take it the David Goggins way, which is like, let's just take it one step at a time. Let's hope we're there in eight years. Yeah, let's hope we're there. Do you actually? Like right now, you have to think about, the Olympics is gonna be in Los Angeles in 2028. They have it on their YouTube channel. So it's like, I hope that they will just release it. And for money, for whatever, but release it and have that history not be erased, right? It'd be wonderful if athletes could buy. Even if you could buy your own footage, you can't use it commercially, you can't, but you can buy your own matches and have them available for yourself or package the footage, it'd be awesome. Thank you for that. That is quite heartbreaking for me, so I wanted to talk about it a little bit. Let's go to you as an athlete real quick. Sure. You represented the United States at four Olympics, winning a bronze medal at two of them. Who or what was the toughest match or moment you had in those years? Maybe a moment that defined you, that you remember as being particularly defining in your career. I would say the bronze medal match in Atlanta in 96, because up to that moment, the United States team had not won a medal, had not fought for a medal in the games. We were on our home turf. It was my second Olympic games, right? So I had competed in 92 and I had won two matches and lost in the third round in Barcelona. I didn't make the podium. I lost to a Japanese guy from Japan. But the gold, silver, and bronze medalist at that Olympics in Barcelona were all guys that I had beat. In fact, two of them I was undefeated against in my entire career, the Brazilian and the Cuban I had never lost to. So that's when I knew I was capable of being on the podium at the Olympic games. When 96 came around, I was 25 years old. I was fairly in my prime. I had lived in Japan for six months. My technique was at a high level. I was amongst the best in the world. I lost at that Olympics to a guy from Mongolia. It was right before the match I was supposed to fight against Japan. So I was anticipating the match against Japan and I got beat by the Mongolian. So that was kind of a letdown. But the match for the bronze in front of the hometown crowd, all of my family, all of my friends, everybody who had ever helped me in the sport were in the stands that day, including all my teammates at Brown University that were on the wrestling team and little, my uncles, my aunts, everybody was in the stands, right? So it was like the Jimmy Pedro day. And I'm getting goosebumps right now talking about it. But it was a match against the Brazilian for the bronze medal. I had beaten the Brazilian like two or three times before that. And I found myself down in the match. He actually countered me. I came in my Taiyo Toshi and he was waiting for it and he counted me and he scored a yuko against me. So I was losing the fight, came down to about the last minute in the match and I was just tucking in my gi and fixing my thing and gathering my thoughts together. And the whole crowd just started chanting, USA, USA, USA. And I like literally like got so much energy. I walked out there, I grabbed the guy, I came in my Taiyo Toshi again. He stepped off the Taiyo Toshi. I threw him with duchimada for Ippon. I won my first Olympic medal in front of the hometown crowd. Everybody went bananas. The United States judo team had our first medal from the Olympics. It ended up being the only Olympic medal we won at that games. But it was like a magical moment that defined my career and solidified myself in like history where, hey, now I get to step up on the Olympic podium and I'm Olympic medalist. And to me, that was my defining moment. And after that, I was sold. Like man, I had to go back to the Olympics again. I wanna win a gold medal. I want this feeling all over again. I don't care if I have to wait four years, let's do it. In your career, like moments like that, do you think you love winning or hate losing more? So do you live for those moments or are you more driven by just how much you hate losing? So in order to be a champion, my belief is that you have to hate losing more than you like winning. Hate losing more than you like winning. But I live for those moments when you do win. And what excited me the most in my career when I was competing was I loved being in the finals. I loved the spotlight being on me. I can't think of too many times in my career, of course there were a few, but there weren't too many times where the chips were down, like the lights were on and I didn't win. Like it was, I might've lost early in the day and didn't make it to the finals or didn't make it to the medal rounds. But like in my career, I have a ton of golds. I have a ton of bronzes, which means the lights are on and I won and I have very few silvers and very few fifths. So I either lost in the early rounds and didn't make it to the medal rounds in my younger days or the spotlight came and I really shined. Cause if you look, I don't know how many silvers, but there wasn't very many silver medals in my career that I won. You know what I mean? So I just loved that moment. I didn't feel pressure. I loved the crowd. I loved being in the spotlight. I didn't have, I wasn't nervous when it came to the finals or I knew I was getting a medal. It didn't matter. You know, so it was just me against the other guy and that's how I always saw it. And I just loved that moment. So your dad was your coach. Yeah. You didn't get to meet him tonight. Oh, great. He's kind of a legend in the sport. So how has your dad helped you as a coach, as an athlete, as a human being throughout the years? Number one, my dad is the most brutally honest person you will ever meet in your life. Brutally honest. He will tell you, if you are fat, he will tell you you're fat, right, to your face. He wants you to get better. He wants you to be healthy. Yeah. Doesn't want you to die of obesity. It's just the way he is. If you didn't do well, he will not sugarcoat it. He will let you know what you didn't do right. So he's the ultimate litmus test. Yes. Right? Second is, he is the most passionate, caring, deep, always thinking about, very cerebral, very like a student of the game, somebody who helped me immensely in defining my strategy, helping me improve, and always look for what's next. Third, in terms of training, I think that he's probably the most brilliant human when it comes to preparing an athlete physically, not necessarily mentally, physically, for success. When all the chips are down, that athlete will be ready that day, and he has a system of training and preparing and getting the athlete to peak for performance. You mean like conditioning, like the whole thing? Yes. Okay, because I vaguely remember Kayla Harrison talking about her preparation being very difficult. Yeah. That's it. That's him. Yeah, that's him. At the same, you go back and ask Ronda Rousey about her career, right? My dad was her coach. My dad moved her to Camp New Hampshire in Boston, got her up, ran her in the morning, had her downstairs in the basement of his house, training with the weights. We brought a Russian girl in. She did throws on his cement outside with the little crash pad. Nice. Threw the Russian girl a hundred times that morning, and then every night came to Boston, to the training center in Wakefield, trained at night, and went back and slept at my dad's house, and three weeks straight before she went off to Beijing. And he did the same with Kayla. He did the same with me. His passion is producing athletes at the highest level, and he knows how to do it. And then the one side of my dad's coaching where I think there's a flaw or a weakness is on the mental preparation side of the game. He wasn't somebody that was, I don't know if he, maybe because he wasn't an Olympic champion himself and wasn't a world champion, he lacked the confidence in helping others be more confident. So he's more of a, this is what you need to work on type of thing. He doesn't know how to build the athletes up to make them feel invincible. And I feel like that's something that I was able to give all of the athletes, to help them with that visualization, belief in yourself, knowing that you're gonna win before you step out of the mat, knowing that we've earned the right to victory, seeing success in your mind, having a positive mantra that you, I'm the best in the world, nobody's beating me today, type of feeling. So you go out there feeling like King Kong when you step on the mat, that nobody's gonna stop you. And so I think the combination of both of us as coaches, I'm a lot more technical. My dad is good at letting, identifying what they need to do for their techniques and what, in strategy, how to beat opponents and putting game plans together. So combined, the two of us made an unbelievable team. So he's not gonna let the athlete be soft when they enter the highest, the most difficult competitions of their career. So on the mental side, what's mental preparation look like? Like how many years before the Olympics do you start helping an athlete believe that they can win an Olympic medal? Well, I think it's gotta be a seed in that athlete's brain, something they wanna do, right? Nobody can quickly get there, right? It's a long process. But if your goal, if you're national champion or you've proven yourself to win in some international tournaments, and you think the Olympics is a possibility for you, then defining it as, hey, I wanna be on the Olympic team, that would be the first step into getting ready. And I always make them put it on paper. If it really is your goal, then you show me that it's your goal and put it on paper and commit to it. I wanna be Olympic medalist, I wanna be Olympic champion, I wanna go to the Olympics. World team member, maybe junior world team member, whatever it is, we walk before we go to the highest level. But if the goal is to go to the Olympics, let's accomplish these other things first, right? Because if we can accomplish these other things, then we're on our way to getting to the ultimate goal, which is the Olympics. For somebody like Kayla, for example, she didn't say that she wanted to be Olympic champion when she first came here in 2005, right? We wanted to become national champion, then we wanted to be on the world team, then we wanted to be a world medalist. Then our sights were set on the Olympics or the Olympic gold. So it's having those clearly defined goals that are attainable. Like they should be a reach, they should be a stretch, but they have to be attainable. They can't be just a pipe dream. But once you put it to paper and you think it's achievable, then it's mapping the plan to get there. Is there a daily process of visualizing yourself as an Olympic champion or national champion? Yes, it is, and you should do it either every night before you go to bed or before every training session or after every training session. One of those three times it should, or first thing you wake up in the morning, because it may be to help some people, it motivates them to go do what it is they're supposed to do in the day. But the process of visualization is, to me, is closing your eyes for a few moments. Your brain works really, really fast, right? And it's actually picturing the day in its entirety, from start to finish, from the moment you wake up and you step on the scale to the moment you have your breakfast and you go through your morning routine. Like live the day that you're gonna have at the Olympics. So whatever it is you're trying to do, let's say the Olympic day, for example. Picture yourself making weight, picture yourself, who you're around, eating your breakfast, having maybe saying a few jokes, laughing. This is a real day, make it real. Going back and packing your judo bag for the day, getting on the bus, driving to the venue, feel what it's like walking into the stadium for the first time, going to the warmup area, seeing your drawer up on the sheet, who you're gonna fight that day, watching yourself warm up, go through your warmup routine, walking out of the shoot, into the venue, going to do that first fight. Picture the moment of throwing your opponent, coming off the mat, high fiving the coach, getting ready for your second fight. Like live the day from start to finish and make it as real as possible. We're all the way to the moment where you've just won and you're raising your arms in celebration, you're bowing, you're hugging your opponent, you come off the mat, you hug your coach, you're running around the stadium with the flag, you stepped up on the podium, you heard your name, Olympic champion, Jimmy Pedro, like you heard the moment, the medal being put around your neck, picture the people coming up on the podium with you, arms around them, taking the pictures. Like the more real you can make it, even before it ever happens, right? When you do that enough times, I feel that like pathways get created for you so that when your body gets to that moment, and I've been here before, this is it, this is my moment, this is what I pictured my whole life, I'm not nervous, because I've seen this, this is gonna happen, I believe it's possible, right? And I believe the athletes that do that and make it real enough that when they get to that moment, they go right through, there's no hesitation. This is what this is meant to be, this is my destiny, this is why I did everything I did, versus the ones that don't think about it ever, but just kind of like hope, it's not real to them, it doesn't feel attainable, they don't believe it's possible, they haven't committed to believing it was possible. Without that commitment in yourself and that belief, it can't happen. And one thing that, I talked to Travis a bit about this, you probably worked with him on the details of what you're talking about, but he said that you should really focus on visualizing the sensations you feel. So say if you're drinking coffee or something like that, you're not thinking about like observing yourself from a third person perspective drinking coffee, like you're thinking of how your hand will feel when it touches something warm. Like you try to replay the actual sensations you would feel, right? So it sounds kind of strange, but meaning like you really wanna put yourself in the body as you would experience those moments, as opposed to like watching yourself on TV experience in those moments, like really be inside. And yeah, so that means sensations, like how does it feel when you grip a gi? How does it, yeah, the sweating, just the sensation of sweat, like rolling down your forehead or whatever, like all of those actual feelings. When I explain it to you, like I guess my body has been through it so many times, both in my mind and in reality that it brings back all of those same emotions. I start to get goosebumps, my armpits start to sweat, like I'm living it if it's real. I'm reliving it now. But when you're going through the visualization process, it has to be that real, the smells, the taping of the fingers, like the more colorful and the more real you can make it, the more believable it is. So I've been doing this kind of thing, just having listened to you enough for other stuff in life, so let's see if it works. But do you see this kind of visualization being useful for other things in career and all those kinds of things? 100%, 100%, because I just know with my own life, my own experiences, like my wife sometimes says to me, she says, well, where do you see yourself in like five years from now? And five years ago, I had said to her, I wanna have my own business. I wanna have, this is the amount of money that I'm hoping I can make in a given year. Like you have to have goals for yourself. Like is this, if you put out there like, okay, I wanna make a million dollars in a year. That's a big number. Like for me or for the normal person, like that's a really big number. You know what I mean? Like it's not, especially when you're not making that much at the time, it's a super big number, right? So having those goals for yourself, like it won't happen and it's not possible unless you dream it's possible and think that it's possible. And then it doesn't magically happen. And maybe it doesn't happen in five years, maybe it happens in 10, but at least you're on the path to getting there. You know what I mean? And I said, I wanna own my own business. I wanna control my own destiny. I wanna be my own boss. I wanna make my own decisions. Like these are the things that I told her I wanted to do. And now I'm at that point, where I work for myself, I have my own company, I have partners obviously, but like if I wanna pick up and go somewhere for a week, I just do, I don't have to ask permission to do it, right? That's what life, freedom, right? That's what I'd like. And all of it starts with a dream. In the same with my dojo, when I first opened. So I ran a dojo for a long time and I only had 60 students always, like 40 to 60 students had fluctuated. And I sit there and say, why can't I get more people in my door, right? So I hired consultants to come in and look at my business and say why, right? And they came in and said, well, this place is really intimidating. Like if I was coming in off the street, the first thing I see is this big Olympic champion on the wall and I see this training that's going on and these guys are flying through the air and landing hard. And as a white belt, you're telling me that's the class for me? Like no way, I'm not gonna do that. So like I listened to these people and I said, you're right. And the training was hour and a half, two hours long. People can't handle an hour and a half or two hours training when they're first walking in the door. So I had to restructure all my programming. I had to look at the way I was offering my school and I had to make levels for everybody, right? Like here's my four to six year old class. Here's my six to 13 year old class. There's all my beginner classes. They don't mix in with the advanced people. And I had to learn how to make it accessible for everybody instead of just the people that wanted to train hard. And then the challenge was, okay, if you can have a lot of people in your dojo training, it's a recreational school. You can't produce champions at that same school. That's what I was told. So then I got all my black belts together and I said, listen, this is my vision. This is what I want. I wanna have a club that has over 200 judo only athletes, no jujitsu, no karate, nothing, judo only. I want over 200 people. And in the inside of that dojo, I wanna have Olympic champions and I wanna have recreational, like little kids, five and six years old, older guys in their seventies train, I don't care, but I want the spectrum of recreational and I want Olympic champions. The only way to do that is to take your instructors and say, you're gonna do this, define the roles, who's gonna be the recreational coach, who's gonna be the competitive coach. How do we separate these programs? And lo and behold, that was my vision that I shared with all of them and that was back in 2006. And by 2012, we've got Olympic champion Kayla Harrison, we have over 200 people at the school, we have a successful thriving business, but it doesn't happen without that vision, a plan and believing that it's possible. Believing that it's possible. I don't know, but I personally have on top of that almost like very specific visions of a future. Like, I don't know what, cause I don't wanna give actual examples. Cause for several reasons, one of which is just people will, as they often have, they often will in your life, they'll just laugh at it a little bit, like that seems silly. And I don't, I'm very hesitant to share certain things like that with people because they'll, I mean, I'm with Johnny Ive, who's the lead designer in Apple, like you want that dream, that little flame to not, people will put that flame out too easily, even people that love you. So I have very specific kind of visions, like maybe for Travis, it would be like a specific opponent or something like Ole Bischoff, like very specific, very specific situation of what's going to happen. Not just like, I wanna be an Olympic champion, but very specific, like almost silly situations. Yeah, like the dynamic between Travis and Ole Bischoff or something, like maybe visualize that. For me, that helps because it makes it all real, even more real. It's not like some big goal, like a million dollars or something like that, which is also really important to have because you can measure it and so on. But it's just like you belong in those situations. Just believing you belong there. It's not the default. It can be you. Yeah, it could be you. And for some reason, that really helps me, the little details. Sure. Like visualizing, most of them are almost a little bit funny, like focusing on the funniness. It's the mundaneness of it helps me a lot. And all the people that have done great things, they're just human too. Correct, and I think a lot of people overestimate who others are and sell themselves too short. Because at the end of the day, everybody started like everybody else, really. I mean, we did. We're all infants. We couldn't walk, we couldn't talk, we couldn't do anything. We learned along the way. And I think that's the one thing that I realized is that, and I tell this to my athletes, but I also tell it to my recreational students, nobody is better than you are, nobody, unless you allow them to be. If you really want something to happen, then like map the plan, believe in yourself, decide, and know full out, you're gonna fail a lot. You're gonna get beat down. You're gonna have losses. You're gonna have struggles. And I think that's the one thing with social media today is that everybody sees everybody succeed. Nobody posts the picture when they're on the ground and fail, you're losing. Like nobody sees when you broke your arm and you had to go through rehab, whatever it is, like had your injuries and you were on your couch watching TV and you were suffering and you were like, everybody has really, really dark, bad moments in their life and defeats and losses and suffrage. And it's only at the end after they've recovered from all of that, they've reclimbed up the mountain and they've gone to the pinnacle that you see them on social media with the medal, right? But everybody else like struggles and was human and failed many, many times. And convincing yourself that you're capable, I think is the first start of everything. Do you need people in your life that believe in you or should most of it come from within yourself? I think most of it has to come in from, it certainly helps, but it has to come from you first. You have to be driven, like other people can help you define where you wanna go and help you get there and encourage you and can support you and whether it's resource wise or with connections and like they can help with that path, but that first part has to come from you. It has to be your passion, your desire, your commitment to yourself. You're the one that's gonna ultimately make all the sacrifices to do it. So it has to be your decision, not your parents, not your spouses, something that you're really motivated to do. Let me ask you about Travis, Kayla, and maybe a few of the other athletes you've been involved with. So first, Travis. Travis Stevens, Olympic silver medalist, three time Olympian, 2008, 2012, 2016. What makes Travis Stevens great? What makes him so successful? What makes him unique in your mind as an athlete? Through all the hardship he had to overcome, through his weird looking sayonagi that eventually worked out nicely, through the full richness of his personality, in the context of all the other great athletes you've coached, what makes him special? His fight, Travis has fight. And you know, the first time I ever saw Travis Stevens was in, like recognized him, maybe I had seen him before as a younger boy or something, but like actually recognized him as, I brought a group of young kids to Italy for a competition in a training camp. And it was this program called U23 Elite. And I picked, handpicked 20 kids to go to this event. And it was the first time I coached an international team. And I had never seen Travis fight before, compete, train, anything. And during this competition, you know, he's an 81 kilo player. I think he was maybe like 18 years old, 17, 18 years old. And it was a really hard European event. And I think Travis won three matches and he lost two. But what stood out the most to me was like, the fight he had in him. He was scrapping every fight. Like he scrapped hard. Like he wanted to win more than any of them, right? He didn't win, but he wanted to win more. And I noticed that right away. And then I also noticed that after he lost his second match and he was eliminated from the tournament, I saw how disappointed he was in himself. Like he actually thought he was supposed to beat those people. Even though he was like 17, right? And he's fighting against grown men that are, you know, a high level judo, much higher than he was. And I said to him, I said, hey son, like, don't worry, man. You got a long career ahead of you. Like, I'm glad you're disappointed, but there's so many things you don't know and so many skills you don't have. The fact that you were able to hold your own and scrap like that, like you've got a good future. And I remember calling my friend, Jason Morris, after that tournament. And I said, hey man, did you ever hear of this kid, Travis Stevens? He says, no, why? I said, man, that kid's got some fight in him, right? And I said that, I said that to Jason at the time. I said, that kid's got some fight in him, man. He's pretty talented, you know? And that's how it started. But so I saw that in him when he was young. But the other thing was, Travis, like, there's no such thing as hard work to that guy. If you tell him to put his head through the wall and that's how he wins, he'll go put his head through the wall. He'll do whatever it takes for him to do to achieve success. And he hates failure more than he likes winning, 100%. He always has. He punishes himself when he doesn't do well. He makes himself work harder. He goes and just abuses himself when he doesn't succeed because he's so heartbroken and disappointed in himself. So that's a trait that I think all of the athletes that I work with closely, they all had that same trait. They hated losing more than anything. They would break their arm. They'd fall on their head. They'd rather get hit by a car than lose a judo tournament. And as a result, then they all had fight and they all were willing to train. They were willing to listen. They would do anything for victory. Within the rules, I'm not talking about taking drugs or anything like that, but they'd give 100% of themselves for victory. And Travis was somebody that when he was down, he found a way to get better doing something else. If he couldn't do standing, that's when he started jujitsu. He couldn't go on his feet anymore. He couldn't stand up and train. Might as well go learn jujitsu and get good on the ground because I can. So he always found a way no matter what obstacle was in his way, he just went around it. So what about, it'd be interesting to get your perspective because I know Travis's perspective is just the number of injuries. Like what do you make of the perseverance through all the injuries he had to overcome? Specifically like you just observing this creature that you've coached. I mean, he seems to not see the injuries as a problem. He just like, just like you said, head through the wall. It's like what, like when we were talking about injuries, he kinda, he doesn't even see the injuries themselves as the problem because he thinks that the injuries, you know, you heal back stronger. I forget the exact quote, but he said like, my body is now less injury prone than most of anyone else. Because I've already broken everything. I've broken everything and it's just grown back stronger. Like, cause I asked him something like, do you regret sort of pushing your body to all of those places that resulted in those injuries? He was, his response was like, no, I'm stronger now. So I don't know if that's justification, but that certainly describes a mindset that, yeah, head through the wall. That doesn't, it's almost not dramatic. Like, look, I got this injury. It's so, I'm so like brave and special for overcoming this injury. He's just, he's just, that's part of the job and he gets the job done. But like that job involves a lot of injuries. One of the talks I gave Travis and that team at that particular tournament was at the very beginning of the camp after the tournament, I said to them, listen, my vision, I shared my vision with them. I said, my vision is, you know, in seven years, cause that was 2005, I said in seven years, I wanna have a US team that steps on the mat that is ready to kick ass. And in order to get there, all of you guys can be a part of this team and part of this process. But in order to get there, you guys have to be the first ones to practice. You have to be the last ones to leave cause we have to work harder than the rest of the world because we're up against all odds. I said, I am sick of America being a laughing stock of judo and being the first round, easy match, warmup for everybody else. I said, if you get injured, you're not gonna be on the side with, you know, with a ice bag on taking off rounds. And then get back on the mat the next day and tell me you're okay. If you can train the next day, you can train today. So there's no injury. The only time you'll leave in this dojo is if the ambulance has to take you out of here. You know, and I do think subliminally, Travis bought into that message and heard that message then, said, if I'm gonna be a champion, that's the way I'm gonna do it. And he did, and he embodied it, he lived it. Man, do it many times in Europe where I said, dude, just tape it up, go off to the side, just take the day off, like, take the rest of the day off, you're beat up, you can't do it. He said, no, no, I'm gonna tape it up, I'm gonna tape it up. I said, no, you don't need to right now. And he said, no, sensei, I'm doing it. You know, the ambulance isn't taking me out, it's just my wrist, it's just my ankle, it's just my wrist. It's just my ankle, yeah, I love it. Yeah, what about the, so the other really big thing is you comment on a little bit is the weight cut. So early in his career, he was 81 kg, and that was presumably not so difficult. But later in his career, he is 81 kg, and it's becoming more and more difficult. So that's the other thing with him is, so I've known a lot of really, really tough people at the highest levels broken by the weight cut. Like that can break the toughest minds. And it doesn't seem to have broken him. And he's delivered on it often, on like insane weight cuts. So just as a coach, what do you think about his, particularly his mind and the challenge of the weight cut? It was part of his process. It was part of his way of getting ready for battle. Suffering? Yeah, it really was. And if I'm gonna suffer this much, then I'm gonna make my opponents pay for all the suffering that I went through to get here. That was his mindset. Later on in his career, you're right, like a lot of times, Travis, he would never step on a scale until he got to the tournament. And even when he get to the tournament, like he'd weigh like 90 kilos. He'd show up at the tournament nine kilos over. I'm like, you have to, but I never, it was just an expectation of making weight. Not making weight was never an option for any of our athletes. And Travis knew it. And he said, as a professional, my job is to make weight. If I don't make weight, he was never gonna allow that to happen. And he was never gonna allow us to come to him and say, hey, I told you. Cause losing wasn't an option, making weight wasn't, not making weight was not an option for him ever either. But a lot of times he wouldn't even, he'd be nine kilos over on the plane going over to the tournament and have to make weight three days later. And he didn't break 86 kilos until the day before the tournament. Like he had five kilos over the day before. That was his way. But he would do three workouts to wake up in the morning and work out. Then he'd eat. Then he'd work out in the afternoon. Then he'd eat again. Then he'd work out again at night. And then he'd reward himself. Hey, I worked out three times today. He'd go have a, you know, a Mountain Dew. Yeah. You know, or a chocolate bar. You know? And then his next morning, he's back up to 87 and he would never touch weight until the morning of weigh ins. That's a, when he, he wasn't on weight for more than like five minutes. His process would break a lot of people. So the fact that he got the job done is... Not just the job done, but every single time he got the job done. And I made those athletes fight. We would fight in Paris. We would do a camp for a week, double session camp for a week. He'd be seven kilos over, have to fight the next weekend. We're talking two or three days later. You know, so not only did he make the weight, but he did a grueling training camp twice a day. And then cut weight and then fought again. Then did another camp for a week in double session training camp, and then fought on a third weekend in a row. And our athletes went through hell. You know, all of our athletes went through hell because on the tour around the world, they fought in every event. They did every camp. They fought in every event. Whereas most of the other teams, like Japan comes in and fights in Paris, then they go home. You know, they maybe do a camp for three days, then they go home. They don't stay in Europe for four or five weeks straight and fight in every tournament. And when you get to Germany, the Germans skip the French Open. They skip the camp in France. They're just getting ready for Germany. Our athletes already had two competitions, two training camps, three weight cuts now. And then, so they're not 100% when they fight in Germany, but that's all part of the experience they need, the training that they need that they don't get here in this country. And all of those were just preparation for our world championships or our Olympic games. So by the time our athletes got to those tournaments, they felt so strong, so rested, so like, man, this guy that felt like a monster in Germany feels like nothing today because you're fully rested now, you know? But part of the challenge is because the American team is smaller and more, I mean, just smaller, is all the different places you go to do the weight cut, to do the diet, to do the preparation or the recovery, there's, like that process changes every time. So you basically have to improvise a lot. So you show up to a hotel and how you do the weight cut, you don't know. And this is the different weather conditions. It's not, it's like, what is it? Rocky versus Drago, right? That's it. So you don't have, you have to just improvise. And that's also a fascinating part of the American judo story, which is like, you have to improvise more. Well, it was funny because when I, it was 1990, and it was at the Goodwill Games, right? And we were, it was a US Olympic committee type event. And so we're on the bus with the swim team. And it was me and Jason Morris on the American team, and we're going to the judo competition, but we're on the bus with the swim team. I'm sorry, we're going to the venue where we're staying. You know, I remember being like by ourselves with no staff, no manager, no coach, we're just by ourselves going to fight in Russia, right? And the swim team's on there with their full sweats and their staff and like their managers. And I heard the lady, the girl go, I'm sorry, this was 1994, because it was in St. Petersburg, Russia. So I heard the little girl on the team, she goes up to the coach, she goes, coach, do you think you can send the massage therapist to my room at 10 a.m.? You know, I'm feeling kind of jet lag. I looked at, me and Jason looked at each other like, oh, she's scheduling a massage? We don't even have a staff. Like what the hell is going on here? You know, what a difference in sporting, you know, different sports within the same country, you know, and. But that, I mean, not to romanticize things, but that you do represent the spirit of the Olympics when you're kind of the improvisational nature of it. Cause it is just you, you and sometimes you and the coach and just pure guts and you against the world with no money. The warrior spirit. The warrior spirit. How did it feel like when he, after being in two Olympics, beating some of the best people in the world, facing some of the best people in the world and just barely losing, what did it feel like to you as a coach to see Travis Stevens win the silver medal? Electric. I like, first of all, in 2012 in London, it was like, it felt like somebody died. I'm not going to be, I'm not going to lie to you. Like. The Ole Bischoff match? Not, no, just seeing Travis not finish on the podium period. You know, in the Ole Bischoff match, I thought he won regardless of who won and who lost. He just left everything he had on that mat, right? 10 minutes of probably it was a 20 something minute match, but 10 minutes of fighting actually, right? He left everything he had. He wanted to be in the Olympic finals. He wanted to be Olympic champion. And when he didn't get that opportunity, he lost everything. He drained himself. He cried for 45 minutes straight. I couldn't regroup him. I couldn't get him up. I said, Travis, you've got to stop your crying. You've got to get off the floor. We've got a bronze medal fight. Like if you don't recover, you're not going to perform well. And he just didn't care. Like it was gold or nothing. And so when he walked out against the Canadian boy, he had beaten the Canadian. I think at that time, he had beaten that Canadian every single time, except for that bronze medal match. But he just didn't have the fight in him anymore. You know, he'd left it all in the match, in the Bischoff match. So to see him come back with zero, right? We just had a team where his best friend, Marty Malloy, won a bronze medal, right? Then the day after Travis fights, Kayla Harrison goes and wins her first gold medal, right? Our first ever gold. So we have a gold and a bronze. His training partner wins a gold. His best friend from growing up wins a bronze. He has nothing, right? To see him for four years go through hell, like literally like all of his injuries, every training camp, and then forget the humiliation, because every time any reporter ever came to my dojo, they want to talk to Kayla. She's the Olympic champion. Who's this Travis guy? Who is this guy? So he didn't medal. He's not that important. And up until you get to right before the Olympics, now they talk about he's an Olympian again. But up until that point, and then every little kid sees Kayla's medal. Oh, Travis, yeah, you went to the Olympics. Where's your medal? How did you do? You know, I took fifth, I didn't place. You know, it's the lowest of low, every day having that constant reminder. So four years later, when that guy, I mean, mentally, he was ready. Physically, he was ready. That was the best and strongest Travis Stevens that I've ever seen and I've ever felt. Like, cause I had to get on the mat and do some drills and stuff like that, and like try to defend armbars, and cause we didn't have a lot of bodies in Rio. And I was like, my God, he's, I said after one of the prizes, those are the strongest I've ever felt that guy, right? Before the competition, so physically he was ready. Mentally, the morning of competition, I said to Travis, I looked him in the eye, and I said, you know, we're ready to go over to the venue. I said, are you ready today? And he just looked at me like he goes, I am gonna shock the world today. That's what he told me, I'm gonna shock the world today. And I said, all right, great, let's go, right? So we go to the venue, and every other athlete was just like nervously, like doing repetitions of Uchi Komis. You could see like sweat coming out. You could see like all this nervous energy going through their body. And here comes Travis Stevens. He's got these big goofy headphones on. He's got a tank top that says USA on it. He's got the swim trunks that say USA, like that have shiny letters that glow in the dark. And he's like, and this is in the middle of the judo hall where all these athletes are warming up for their first match. He's like dancing around, like doing this loose warmup, like almost like a little kid at an amusement park whose dad said, yeah, go play, you know? And it was like, he had waited four years for that moment, and he was so relaxed, so focused, so relaxed, and couldn't wait. It was like a caged tiger. Like if you like coming out of the chute to go step on to the mat was like this tiger that you were just letting out of the cage, and he just go, like now's your time to go fight. And that's what he did that whole day. And like when he beat Chirikishvili in the semis and choked him out and won that fight, like there's nobody with the exception of maybe the guys in the American team, there was nobody in that stadium that expected Travis to beat him, nobody. Like, you know, he had smashed Travis, I don't know how many times before that free poem, like in the first minute even. It wasn't even a fight, right? And it was great game plan. He's the world number one at the time too. World number one at the time, world champion, carried the flag for the Georgian Federation walking into the games, most dominant 81 kilo player in that weight class for quite some time. And man, we just had his number and Travis was ready to go. It was so cool. It was so awesome. I mean, we had already won, Kayla had already won her second gold, right? The way the event went and Travis winning that was like icing on the cake for our team. That was the best performance we've ever had in history. It's awesome. So you mentioned Kayla. She is one of, if not the greatest American Jidoka ever. Two time gold medalist. 2010 world champion. 2010. First senior worlds. Senior worlds. What makes Kayla special? What makes her so great? What made this champion? It's a combination of a lot of things. One was obviously Kayla's mental toughness, right? To overcome what she overcame. You know, this is a girl who, you know, let's not say forget about the sexual abuse, but the fact that she had to go through that in life and learned how to compartmentalize that and keep that off as a separate part of her brain, you know, and forget about it and move on. That took an incredible team to help her do that, and my dad was a huge part of her accomplishing that. So for people who don't know, we should comment and say that Kayla had to go through trauma in her earlier life through sexual abuse and had to overcome that through the whole process of becoming a champion as well. Because she had zero self esteem, zero self worth. She was at the lowest of lows and didn't even want to be on this earth, right? So she was traumatized obviously and getting her the right help and surrounding her with the right people who could help her get through that and be by her side as she's getting through that and letting her know and reaffirming that she's doing the right thing and she made the right decision and she should have zero guilt. And you know, this doesn't define her. It happened to her, but it doesn't define her. What defines her is what she does from now on. And then rebuilding that person to become who she became. I think the mental toughness is a big part of it, her mind. But then as an athlete, she's a lot like Travis. She's a warrior. She's a fighter. My dad always jokes with her. He says, you're a workhorse. You're not a thoroughbred. We're not gonna treat you like a thoroughbred, right? You're a workhorse, so you're gonna work. And the way you're gonna get bigger and stronger is you're gonna work harder and you're gonna keep, you know. And she came to us when she was only 15. So at that time we got her with a really good strength and conditioning coach. We did all the core Olympic style lifting. Like as her body was developing, she was getting stronger every single day. And then, you know, she had the luxury of being on the mat with, at the time I was still young enough to train and be on the mat and I was around her weight class and Travis was able to train with her and we had all the top US athletes at the time training here at my school. So she got the benefit of all the best guys to train within the country, you know. And her doing all of those rounds, you know, night in, week, night, every night, every week, every year, compiled with the best, you know, highest level she could as a girl. She got the strength, she got the technique, she got the, and then she had the coaching on top of it with my dad being on her as, you know, working her out and, you know, having the wherewithal to develop a strategy and a plan for her. Because when she first came here, she competed at 63 kilos, which is 138 pounds. At the time, Rhonda Rousey was also training here and she was 70 kilos. So if Kayla was struggling making 63, so the only way to, obviously, the only way to still compete is to move up. But my dad said, well, if you move up, then you're in Rhonda's weight. So let's skip that weight and you're gonna go to 78 kilos. And he told her, listen, you're gonna go up two weight classes. She looked at him and was like, that's 172 pounds. And he goes, well, I don't care. Like, you're already struggling making 138, you weigh 150, what's the difference? We put 20 pounds on, go to 170. So that's why she jumped two weights, because she passed Rhonda, she went to the weight above so she could make the national team and she had a chance to go to the Olympics and all that, because we envisioned Rhonda staying around till 2012. And that's also like a longterm vision because you kind of grow into that body then over time. Correct. So you can dominate, you can learn what it's like in that weight class. You can learn to dominate that weight class, excel and then dominate. People that cut weight too hard, too long, they forget about technique because they're only worried about losing weight. They're always tired in training. They don't give 100% effort, they're not getting better. She now is just focused on getting better at judo, getting bigger, getting stronger, getting more powerful. So I think giving her that purpose and that, that was a great call. What are some memorable or maybe the most memorable moment, Kayla Harrison moment to you as her coach? Not the most perhaps, let's say, what are some memorable moments? Everybody hears the good ones, right? So everybody knows she won the world championships in Tokyo in 2010. She was our two time Olympic champion in 2012, 2016. I'll never forget those moments, right? Cause they're historic. One of the biggest moments that I liked sharing this story with everybody is that in 2010 in January, Kayla was still a developing athlete and we had a local tournament in New York. It was in Brooklyn, New York, it was called the Starrett Cup. And I knew that at that tournament that two of the Canadian girls, they were like ranked 15th or 20th in the world. They weren't superstars, but they were tough players. Both of them, I knew were gonna be at that tournament. So I said, Kayla, we're gonna go to this tournament, you're gonna compete against the Canadian girls, get some good experience, figure out what you need to work on and then we'll go home and work on some stuff. Well, she went to the tournament, there was only three girls in the weight, her and the two Canadians. At that tournament, she lost both fights, right? So this is January, 2010, she lost both matches. She was competitive, but certainly things she needed to work on, it was good development thing for her and for us. It also opened her mind to say, oh man, cause she was already a junior world champion at the time. But so now there's another level, this is a senior level, right? You gotta go up another level. Here's two girls that aren't even medalists that are beating you. So now there's more work to be done. And so I like telling that story because everybody sees the champions in the greatest moments, they don't see them when they have bad days. And could you imagine being, oh and two, you feel like a failure, right? But 10 months later, it was Tokyo 2010, she went from oh and two at Starret, New York to world champion 2010 in the motherland in Japan. I mean, that's an amazing turnaround. And that's only possible if you put the losses in their proper context, you don't let it destroy you mentally and just keep moving forward. Correct. This is so funny. So you were there 2010 at the Starret Cup? Was Travis there? Yeah. I made all those, we fought at every, like the mentality of our team was no tournament is beneath us. If our goal is to go to the Olympics in the world and win, there's no tournament that's beneath us. We're gonna get experience, we're gonna fight, we're gonna learn, we're gonna compete, we're gonna get better, you know? I actually, just as a funny little side, I was there, I competed. Really? This is one of the earlier tournaments, like the beginner division. Oh no, I actually did black belt division too. That was one of the, actually yeah, I remember that. That's when it was so early that I thought, like I was also really strong at that time, just like physically like power lifting stuff. So I thought like it'll be good experience to also do black belt division. And remember, it must have been actually Travis's division, which is funny. Is Legere Brothers? Yeah, Harry and Gary. They are super, they're super good and they're super dominant, but I think Travis faced one of them and beat them. I don't know, I just remembered, it's funny how there's just like these little roads that later reconnect. But yeah, there's some incredible people there. And I saw obviously the positive things and it's interesting that Kayla's story was also intersecting there and that was one of the lower points for her. Another story I like to share is that you have to know your athletes, right? And you have to really get to know their, what they're thinking psychologically, mentally, what's going through their head. Another story was in Tokyo. It was 2015, the Tokyo Grand Slam. So we had had Kayla face off against almost all the top girls in her division. She had beaten everybody going into the 2016 Olympics. But at the 2015 Tokyo Grand Slam, there was a girl from Japan that she hadn't fought in a long time and she lost to the girl last time she fought her. So it was something we wanted her to beat this girl going into the Olympics so that she knew she could beat everybody. And it was a first round match and it was gonna be tough for Kayla, right? It was gonna be a really hard fight. And she had won a bunch of tournaments in a row leading up to that. So her confidence was really high, but at the same time, she didn't think she needed this fight. And she showed up to the tournament and she said, I don't think I can fight today. I've got a stinger in my neck. I've got a stinger coming down my neck and I'm kind of sore. And she didn't tell us. She went and told the trainer. She walked around, she's holding her neck. And me and my dad were like, what's up with her? I don't know. And then, so maybe she doesn't wanna fight today. I don't know, right? So all of a sudden the trainer comes up to us and she didn't come to us. The trainer came to us and says, you know, I really don't think it's a good idea that Kayla fight today. And we looked at him and we're like, well, your opinion doesn't really matter, does it? Right? Yeah. What's up with her? Yeah. Well, she has this thing in her neck. It's like a pinched nerve and there's this and that. We talked, I said, is there a risk of her getting injured? Like, is this pain or is this risk that she's gonna get injured and she's gonna set her back like long time in her career? Says, no, she's not gonna get injured. It's just a pinched nerve. It's a little pain she's gonna have to deal with. I go, okay, well, can you fix the pain? Says, yeah, I can do this and that and I can give her a shot and the pain will go away. I said, okay, then do that. And so Kayla comes up, she goes, didn't the trainer talk to you? I said, yeah, he talked to us. Well, he said, I can't fight. I know, but we already talked to the trainer and. I love it. He said, you're good to go. She looked at us like. And then we had to talk to her and say, listen, you're not injured, you're in pain because we just came from a camp. I said, you're in pain, but here's the deal. We want you to fight this girl. We want you to go out there and beat this girl, period. I don't care. I want to know that you can beat this girl. This is why we came. This is our last hard tournament before the Olympic games. This is what we want from you. And lo and behold, she understood. They gave her a quick shot. The rest of the world thought we were crazy making her compete. And then she went out there, she fought, didn't even know she was injured. No, you know what I mean? She just went out there, she fought the tournament. She beat the Japanese girl. She ended up going through the whole tournament. She took a gold medal. She won the event. Mm hmm. That turned out to be a great confidence builder, yeah. And that kind of sets you up for all the chaos that can happen at the Olympic games. And it tells you if you can beat these girls when you're not 100% and you're not at your best, you're physically beat, mentally beat, imagine what you're gonna do when you're fresh. Well, when she was going to the Olympic games, there's a lot. She had the mental game down. Down. Down. There wasn't a girl in that division that thought they could beat Kayla going into those games. Not a one. They just looked at her and went, no, not happening. Yeah, that's great. I mean, she's a great Olympic champion, two time Olympic champion. But there is something that she's commented on, which is she's suffered or went through depression after winning her second Olympic gold. Why do you think this happens? You often hear stories of great champions becoming depressed after the Olympics. There's a lack of purpose afterwards, right? Because you've done in life what you set out to do. You've had a goal every day you woke up. You knew what your purpose was. You knew what your day looked like. You knew why you were doing that. And all of a sudden you won and you got all the fame and you're all happy. But then you wake up and you go, now what? I don't have a next. And also because there was nothing for her, there was no path set out for Kayla that said, okay, you're gonna become an ambassador, a global ambassador of judo. The IJF is gonna help pay a salary. The USA judo is gonna give you a salary. Here's what we want you to go teach children. We want you to go be an ambassador for women. We're gonna fly you around and whatever it is. We're gonna give you a job and here's what you're gonna do if you'd like to take it. There was nothing for her. Like I remember doing the interview at the Olympics with her and they said, are you gonna compete in the next Olympics? And I said, no. Like why? She already two time gold medalist. What does three time gold medalist do for her? Nothing, right? Doesn't motivate her to do it again. They said, are you doing MMA? I said, no, why would she do MMA? That's ridiculous. Like she doesn't need MMA. She should be able to make a living off of what she's accomplished in this sport for the rest of her life. But what happens is, and what most people don't understand is once you say I'm retired, I'm no longer competing in the sport of judo, you don't get a salary from USA Judo anymore, which she was getting. I think she got like $72,000 a year from USA Judo at the time. You don't get a stipend from the Olympic committee anymore. Goes away. Your sponsor, like the New York Athletic Club was a great sponsor for her for all those years. In fact, she could have never been the athlete she became without the support of the NYC. Cause I talked to them when she was 15, I said, hey, I got a girl that's really good someday. Like if you invest in her now, I promise you she'll pay back for you. And I remember the day she won the Olympic gold, I called the guy up, I said, hey, I told you so. But they can no longer give you stipends because you're not competing and representing them anymore. So that goes away. All of your sponsorships and all of your money that you would make from your TV commercials or whatever, that didn't happen for her after the Olympics cause Judo's a obscure sport, right? So she didn't have any opportunities for that. At the end of the day, she has no revenue coming in. How do you live? You get a bonus of 25 grand from the Olympic committee or whatever for winning a gold. But aside from that, you're not gonna live on that money. So no purpose, no goal, right? What am I gonna wake up and do tomorrow? So it's really interesting. Now would be the time, and now is the time, to identify talent and get commitment out of students that in seven years, you can make a US Olympic team because we're gonna have a full team. America's gonna have 14 athletes compete in those games, one in every weight class. So now's the time, if you're gonna go on a journey to the Olympics and stay with the sport of judo, now would be the time to do it, you know? And so what, you show up to the Pedro Judo Center and how much drilling, how much technique, strategy discussions, how much randori, or like live sparring, how much conditioning and strength training, how much of all that? How much of cross training to other gyms or something like that, traveling abroad? Is there something to be said about some aspects of that system? For sure. You need it all. What you just said, you need it all of it. And we do do all of that. Right now, we have a young group of kids at the Academy, you'll see tonight. Some of them are 14, 13, 15, 17. Are they good? Yeah, really good. Okay, can't wait. They're right around your waist, so it'll be perfect. That's nice. They're just young boys, but they've been training hard through COVID. We've been, Travis and myself have been training them. We share responsibilities. They're doing randori like five nights a week. We have them doing randori Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays is when they're doing randori. They're coming to the dojo Friday night and Sunday night to do training. We also have technical sessions for them. They're in school now, so it's a little bit challenging, but they come five o clock in the afternoon and they do a technical session. Through COVID, they were coming every morning doing technical sessions. What's a technical session? It's an hour of repetitive throwing or repetitive drilling to reinforce movements that we deem important to our successful system. So, niwaza positions, groundwork positions, where we want them to be put in this position and they're gonna drill it 50 times with resistance in big groups, doing drills over and over again, picking apart the details of the technique and what they're doing wrong, showing them how to fix it. But now, we've done it so much that now we can do a whole drill session with them where they know all the different techniques inside and out and they can move from position to position really quickly. Do they do it for a period of time, like two minutes, five minutes, or is it like one, two, they're actually counting? No, sometimes it's both. So sometimes we do it for reps, sometimes we do it for time. So sometimes it might be as many as they can do in 60 seconds or as many as they can do in two minutes. And sometimes it might just be, I want you to do every position five times. In terms of throws, we're not talking about it on a crash pad, right? It's just. We're talking about free moving around the mat. And just dynamically and just throwing. Correct. How many, because as I was mentioning to you offline, Travis threw me a few times, a lot of times when he was visiting in Austin, and I just remembered, so there's two things. Fortunately or unfortunately in my life, having gotten a chance to train with folks of that level, with just cleanness of throw and the power, and it was very nice. I immediately actually enjoyed being thrown like that. To throw a little shade at Craig Jones with his current mat situation, is they're very, they were quite thin. And as Travis commented on, and not just the thinness of the mats, but they were laid on like concrete, right? So I felt, it's like soft until it's not. But being thrown very cleanly, I just felt like there's, this is not gonna lead to injury, it was great. It wasn't injury prone. But then as I mentioned to you, when a day or two after, my entire leg, one of them, I guess it's the left leg, was just black, a bruise. It didn't hurt too bad, but it was just, the body's gotten soft. So I guess the question I have is, does the body get used to just that number of throws? Just over time, being thrown thousands of times a month? Unquestionably. Your body gets used to it. So it hardens, it gets really hard. Which is why judo is hard to come back to after you've taken a long period of time off, because your body is not used to that impact anymore. I always found out that when I was training judo a lot, it's hard to shed weight and keep weight off, because your body, it develops this layer of protection on itself that it doesn't wanna give up. When you're sucking a lot of weight, that means you're frail. So I always seem to retain weight more when you're doing hard judo training, as opposed to losing weight. It's easy when you go out for runs and things like that to shed the water weight, but to actually keep the pounds off was pretty hard. Yeah, the body develops, like you said, a level of protection. What about the randori? Just out of curiosity, again, I haven't ever had the opportunity to train with folks at a high level. In jiu jitsu, there's different gyms at different styles, but I've noticed that at the highest levels, people can go pretty hard in a certain kind of way where it's more technical, and you're moving at 100%, but the power is not at 100%. It's a weird little dance. You're not really forcing stuff. You're more focused on the right timing, the right positioning of hands and feet and body and all those kinds of things. You're not forcing stuff in the way you would in competition, like really the power. Does that sound similar to you for the way you try to do randori? So there's different styles of judo, and I'd say the Japanese style, the technical style of judo is exactly what you just talked about. It's almost like two guys in pajamas, right? We're using minimal effort, maximum efficiency. We're moving around, and we're trying to feel that movement, and it's timing and finesse and technique and fun and clean throws. And when you train in Japan, you can train 15 rounds of randori, five minute rounds. That's 75 minutes of straight sparring. You can do that straight in Japan without a problem. I mean, you'll get tired, of course. You're gonna fall a lot, you're gonna throw a lot, but it's very free feeling, and it's technical as you explained. But then when you go to Europe and you try to do rounds with the Europeans, they are very physical. They don't have that same finesse in their training that they do in Japan. In Europe, you'd be hard pressed to do eight rounds of randori in a night. It's so physically exhausting because so much effort is going into just fighting and fending off the gripping system and the power of your opponent. You're physically drained after eight rounds of randori. So it's a much different feel. When you say Europe, do you mean Germany, France, Britain, Russia? Is there a lot? So there's a kind of similarity to all of those kinds of approaches. The only difference would be Russia that they do a lot more active drilling, a lot more sequential movement training. They don't focus as much on randori. You'll do much fewer rounds in Russia during training camps than you would in those other countries we just talked about, France, Germany, et cetera. What about in this kind of American system where you have much less talent to work with? Do you just select whatever works for the particular athletes, or do you have something you prefer in your system? So you need a combination of all of it. If you're gonna win at the Olympic level, you have to be able to deal with the finesse of the Japanese, the physicality of the Europeans. You have to focus on the ground, niwaza aspect, because a lot of people are weak there in the world of the sport of judo. That's a chance to win. We've sort of developed our American system of judo, at least for the last, I'd say probably the last 20 years it'd be the American system of judo, which relies heavily on taking the individual and whatever techniques they do, perfecting those techniques and the combinations and other throws that go with those throws, but then implementing and overlaying an American system of gripping, niwaza, conditioning, mentality, training methodology, and game planning to beat your opponents. And I think that's the secret sauce to success for your Americans, because there's no way, if we don't have eight partners to train with in a night that are gonna give us good rounds, right? We might have two, so we're gonna have the same guy four times, those two people four, two times each. Now I have four good rounds. The rest of the rounds, I'm not being pushed to the limit. So we train differently. And a lot of times we do a lot of stuff like shark bait. When our athletes are preparing for competition, for example, when Kayla or Travis were preparing for competition, we might only have 20 people in the whole gym to work out with, those two Olympic medalists, right? And of those 20 people, maybe four of them are Travis's size. Maybe there's only one girl in the room for Kayla, she's gotta train with guys. And then the other ones are teenagers that are too weak to train with either one of them. So what we would do is just put together four or five people that could give them a challenge and we'd line them up and they would do a minute, a minute, a minute, a minute, and they'd do five minutes in a row as hard as they can. That person can go hard for a minute with Travis or Kayla. They can't go five minutes hard, but they can go one minute hard. So it made their training much, much more intense, I don't know, so she has no direction. And then at the same time, she has no money coming in. So everything shuts off. So now it's like, wait till you turn, what do you do? And that leads to being depressed because yeah, even though I've accomplished all this stuff, I'm kind of lost in life. Like what's next for me? And I guess you just have to ride that out because when you're a great human being, great champion, life has a way of helping you find a way. I mean, she's in mixed martial arts now, but she has a lot of stuff going on. Right, well, her kids, she adopted her sister's kids. So she's their legal guardian now. So that is her purpose, right? Raising these kids and making them part of her family. And she's fortunate enough that she has enough money that she can do that and she can give them a good life. Mm hmm, I'm gonna ask you to start some trouble. But I heard that she said somewhere that she can be Khabib Nurmagomedov in judo. What do you think? To be honest with you, I mean, I don't know what level of judoka. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what level he is. But I do know that that Russian system respects judo immensely. What I will tell you is this, I trained with Kayla and I was an Olympic medalist and a world champion in judo. And granted, I was older when I trained with her. But you have to go as a man. You have to go 100% or she will smash you as a man. And I could tell you that if Khabib doesn't do a lot of just judo, doesn't like gripping and doesn't understand, if he can throw, that's one thing. But if he doesn't really understand judo at a high level, she will throw him. She would beat him in a match, in a judo contest. Not in a mixed martial arts contest, not in a wrestling contest, not in a submission contest. In a pure judo match. Where he cannot grab legs and he has to grip up and just throw. I'd put my money on Kayla. Unless he's, you know, if he could go place in the nationals in Russia, he would beat her. But if he's not at that level of judo, he's more like a brown belt or he's not, he's not a high level judo player, she will win. I saw her take some of our best juniors in this country. Some of the guys that went and won our, medaled in our senior nationals. I've seen her smash all of them in judo. Now, she's not gonna do that to a Travis Stevens. She's not gonna do that to a senior national champion or an Olympian in our sport. But she will go toe to toe with every other male, black belts or not. Speaking of Khabib in Russia, Vladimir Putin, I don't know if you have heard of him, he's the president of Russia, but he's also a judoka. Have you gotten a chance to see him do judo? What do you think about his judo, if you were to analyze it? So I'm actually really good friends with the Russian Federation. The guy in charge is Ezio Gamba. He's an Italian, he's a mastermind behind their success of the 2012 and 2016 Olympic teams. 2020, he suffered from leukemia, blood cancer, so he wasn't part of their 2020 program. But he was part of 2012, 2016. That whole national, the Olympic team in 2012 came to our studio and lived here for a month in Boston. They went to school in Boston. I brought them to my house. They had three Olympic champions. Three Olympic champions. Oh my God, what a team. They all came and lived here in Boston for a month. They wanted to be part of experience America type program. So I've seen all of them with Putin in Russia at their national training center, working out with them and taking falls and doing judo with him. So it's hard when you're older to move in judo. I mean, I was at a high level and I'm now 51. It's hard for me to move like I used to. So at his age, he's gotta be what, 60, between 62, 65ish? I mean, it moves really well for somebody that's that age and probably hasn't done very much judo for the last however many years, right? So that tells you he, at one point, he had to be a really good judo player. Yeah, he put in a lot of work at some point to develop the technique. You could tell when a great judo player, even if they haven't practiced it, even if they're up there in age, like just the way they move, the way they go in for a Seinage, the way they go for a particular throw, the way they do foot sweeps and all that kind of stuff, you could just tell he's good at judo. And that's kind of fascinating. So it's fascinating to see political leaders. I've gotten to interact with quite a few for whom judo was a formative experience in their life. And that's so interesting that for a lot of people, judo played a big part in their life, early development. It's similar to like if you served in the military. There's just something about judo. It's the, as a martial art, it's not just the technique. So yes, there's something about gaining confidence through becoming aware of what like your body can do, the sort of the artistry and the skill of it, also the power of being able to dominate another human being with technique, but also like the, I don't know, the formality, the discipline of just honoring the tradition of it. So all of that mixed together somehow creates. Memories. It creates memories that kind of define you as a human being and that you carry that forward throughout your life. And I've just been surprised to know how many powerful people internationally have like in their heart, in their, who they are, judo. For sure. At the core of it. It makes you the human being that you are. It really does. Like it becomes a fabric of, the people that stick with it, right? That stay with it. Because it, I mean, it teaches you so many lessons. It's so memorable because of what you talked about, the tradition. But it's also, you grow with other people, and you learn from other people and you experience things with other people. It's such a hands on sport that it's very memorable. And people love it so much. Like right now at my dojo, we have like four generations. Like somebody that did judo with my dad, had a kid who trained with me, who loved judo so much, had a kid. That kid was now in his 20s who did judo. And now has a kid who's two or three or four that's coming to my toddler program at my school. Like we're talking four generations. And they all love the experience so much and what it did for them and their lives that they wanted the next generation to also experience the same thing. This is a tricky question, but if people are interested in judo and want to start learning it, in the United States there's thousands of jiu jitsu schools, for example, is there advice you can give to people interested in judo or maybe to jiu jitsu gym owners? Like how do you get judo as part of your life in America? Well, I mean, if you're fortunate to live near another dojo, right? A place that has judo locally, then that's your best opportunity to learn is to go learn from another school. Unfortunately, sometimes the nearest dojo might not be for two hours or three hours away from where you're at, which is an obstacle. You're not gonna do that. So, I mean, Travis and I did start the American Judo System online. It's at usajudo.com. And we've broken down every single judo technique to the very, very basic elements of just movement. So we teach every technique of how you do it mechanically with just your feet, then how you incorporate your hands and your feet together, how you do it in all directions, moving forward, sideways, backwards, how to then introduce a partner into the movement, how to do basic uchi komi or repetitions with a partner, then moving with a partner, then how to throw your opponent static, how to throw your opponent. So basically from the very foundation of the movement all the way to the most advanced level, we've documented this through separate videos. And we've taken now, I think 12 to 15 of standing techniques combined with a whole bunch of groundwork techniques. And our goal is just to continue to build this platform out so that anybody anywhere can learn online and can ask questions. We have a live training class every couple of weeks, every two weeks, he or I answer questions online for our members. Ideally, what we'd like to do is have a standing curriculum for jujitsu instructors that want to learn and become black belts in judo. Here's how, these are the techniques you need to know. This is how many reps you need to do. This is how efficient you need to get at those techniques to become certified as an instructor or become a black belt. And eventually have an online promotion system where anybody anywhere can just submit videos and show us that they can do those techniques. And obviously we'll have people review them. And this is a dream and a vision, but we've already started the platform. We're about to do a collaborative effort with USA Judo where all of their members will start to get access to this platform as well. And if we can get that influx of money and people on the platform, it'll allow us to hire and grow it faster. So you also want to do certification there. It's not just instruction. Correct. That would be amazing. Yeah. I mean, for me personally, sort of, I mean, mostly in Austin, Texas now. Right. And there's a few judo schools, but it's not really. Right. There's not, and it's just one of those cities that doesn't quite have, I mean, there's a few, it's basically just like a few random judo people that kind of kind of gather together a couple of times a week, but it's not a system, a dojo, an instructor, integrated into a jiu jitsu school or not. The problem with most judo dojos right now is that most of them cater towards the competitive side. Also, a lot of them do it recreationally, meaning this isn't how they make a living. So they're there three nights a week, or they're there five, even if they're there five nights a week, it's still only one junior class and one senior class, and that's it. And it's one size fits all. Doesn't matter what level you're at, it's one size fits all. So you can't get out of the training what you're looking to get out of the training. It's whatever the instructor's teaching. And you can't learn because it's not at the appropriate level for you. And usually you're pushed into doing randori where you have no choice but to do the randori part of the training. So it's a challenge to go learn. And then a lot of times the schools are old school, so they go make you do falls for a half hour. They make you do things, maybe you're a jujitsu person who knows how to fall already, but you haven't proven it to the judo instructor and they don't break the norm and say you still have to fall for six months, which turns a lot of people away as well. So it's like any business. If you don't deliver on your customer's expectations, you're not gonna have very many customers, which is the way it is now. So a lot of people who listen to this, but in general in the United States practice Brazilian jujitsu, which has a lot of similarities to judo as obviously its origins in judo. How would you compare the two arts from the perspective of people just interested about both arts? Do you recommend people who do jujitsu get into judo? How can it enrich their jujitsu? How do you compare the two arts, the actual practice of it and why it might be useful to you? I mean, I think that judo is a hard sport for adults to do. It just is. Especially people that haven't fallen in a long time, aren't very athletic, haven't... I think about my own experience, right? Other than judo, when did I ever do like a forward somersault? Maybe when I was in grade school, right? That's the last time I've left my feet was in grade school. Most people haven't got off of a chair or a couch. They spend eight to 10 hours a day either working behind a computer or sitting on their couch watching TV, right? And they're not that athletic. And they haven't done anything athletic at least probably since high school, right? That's their last athletic endeavor, most of them. So you're talking about as an adult, that's 35 or 40 wanting to start a sport. Judo is a really hard sport to start, especially in today's dojos that don't have a recreational adult program. You know, when it's one size fits all, it's hard. So for those people, jujitsu makes a heck of a lot of sense. Good self defense, it's cerebral, where you got to use your brain, you're a smaller person, you have to use technique, you know, it teaches all the same things as judo, but it's a safe way to do it. And because of the validation it has with the UFC and MMA today, right? Everybody knows jujitsu. So now they can be part of mainstream society and talk intelligently about what they see on television or what's going on on ESPN today, right? They have some knowledge. So they have an identity. And also there's a good culture in jujitsu where it's becoming a family. You know, the dojo is the family place. You go to feel good, you go to see your friends, you go to get fit and you have a good time, right? So it makes a lot of sense why it's growing. Judo on the other hand, I think is a better sport for children to do. It's more, I would say fun and interactive. It's a little easier to teach the kids how to do the throwing skills and for safety and things like that. Their body can handle more than the adults can. They're less likely to get injured. It makes them better athletes because it's a lot more three dimensional in my opinion. So I think there's a good fit between judo can thrive from kids till whatever, high school, college. Jujitsu thrives from that 18 year old up, right? Right now, that's kind of where it is. So as a dojo, you have to kind of focus on the teens and the college, like early 20s, that kind of. Or you need to have, if you're gonna be a successful judo dojo, you have to have that recreational fundamental adult program in your school where people actually come to judo, learn the moves, but aren't pushed into randori training and pushed into things where they're uncomfortable and they can't control the situation because there's too many unknowns. You got an education at Browns. You're somebody, it's amazing because as an Olympian and an Olympic coach, you always emphasize kind of balance and education, all of that side of life. So developing your brain too. So you are an Olympic medalist, a coach of Olympic medalists, you're a business owner. So successful in all these domains. So I have to ask, what advice would you give to young people today, high school, judo age, high school, college, undergrad, how to be successful in their career or just in life in general, how to live a life they can be proud of? I think you have to be true to yourself. You have to decide what it is you really wanna do with your life. Like, and it's hard because when I grew up, I didn't know I was gonna be successful. When I was young, I didn't know I was gonna be an Olympic medalist. I certainly did envision myself owning a couple of companies that makes their living exclusively from martial arts or judo, cause that wasn't really an opportunity when I was a kid, but I've created that opportunity. I would just say that, pick something that you're passionate about. I was stuck in a career before where I wasn't passionate about it. And it was my wife who said, Jimmy, if you can figure out how to make your living exclusively from martial arts, where your brain and your heart and your passion is all towards one thing that you really like, then you'll be successful. And I left the job. I had three kids. I was working for monster.com. I was in internet marketing and I was working for that great company, nothing wrong with the company, but sitting behind the desk from eight till five. And then I get to go to judo from six till nine at night. My whole day is tied up doing something that I'm really not passionate about. She said, if you can figure out how to make money from your dojo and other things judo related, then I think you'll be successful. And so she's the one that my wife, Marie, gave me that advice and I would give that to others. Find something that you love doing where it doesn't feel like work, something you're passionate about. And if the opportunity doesn't exist how to make money on it, you can create the opportunity. Be resourceful, figure it out. Don't let anybody tell you you can't do it. I didn't know that I could have a 200 person judo school that only taught judo because that really didn't exist in this country. That actually charges money like jujitsu charges. We're talking not, there's plenty of clubs out there that charge 10 bucks a month that might have 100 people, but there's not many that, where the tuition is $150 a month having 200 people. So that's a successful business, but it wasn't done before. But be passionate about it, understand you're gonna fail, understand you're gonna get knocked down, beat up, right? There's gonna be dark days, but you gotta persevere. You gotta believe in yourself. You gotta have a plan. You have to be willing to learn from other people. And that's what I did. If I didn't know it, I brought somebody in to tell me, what am I doing wrong? Like, look from the outside, what do you see? Okay, great. Then you gotta be willing to change. You gotta be willing to adapt. And I think listening, believing in myself, and creating opportunity. And the other thing is helping others. Something I always did in my judo life and in my business life. If somebody came to me and asked for help with, hey man, is there something you can do to help me? I'm trying to get this thing started. I'm trying to get this dojo off the ground, or I'm trying to run this event series, or I was creative and trying to figure out a way to help them make it work. Because if that really was their dream, and I could help them do their dream, I felt like that person would then give nothing but good, good comments about us. Good, good, like they'll remember it forever. They become like family. And they'll be the best advocates for your business ever. And so the kids that I taught at my dojo were treated that way. The people that worked for me get treated that way. The people that, my customers that I work with and building their dojos, get treated that way. People that ran tournaments, whether it was Grappler's Quest years ago, and helping that guy with a full set of mats for his, Brian Simmons with his thing, or any of the Gracie's. It just became like family. And then I just work hard and deliver on what I say I'm gonna do. If I say I'm gonna do it, I do it. And I think it goes a long way. Well, and I got a comment. So in a small way, people may not know. I think it's still on YouTube. We previously talked many years ago. And I remember it, you were so kind to me. And you didn't really know who I was. You just took me as a human being. You welcomed me into your dojo. And we just had a conversation on a podcast or whatever the heck you call that thing. And you were just very kind. And you were also just, it was the last conversation I had when I showed up to MIT, and it stayed with me. So I've resumed doing this podcast. But it stayed with me because you said that I did a good job at this. And people, especially at that time, didn't tell me that. And just that little act of kindness is probably just a regular part of your day. You had a busy day, it was the end of the day. Just saying that, that was powerful. And that pays off somehow. So thank you for that. Yeah, but it was sincere, right? It was genuine. I felt like I had been to so many interviews. When it's around the Olympic time, there's lots of beat reporters that come out and they're trying to get your time. And they're there because they have to get the story for their newspaper or their television show. And a lot of times those people show up, right? And they pronounce my name wrong. Or they get something wrong about the background. Or they offend me because they call me for the wrong reason. Or they call me five minutes before that they're supposed to be there and say, oh, sorry, we're running late. We'll be there in an hour and a half. Well, I'm a busy guy too. But you were somebody that showed up, was so prepared with your notes, knew everything about the history of what I had done. The questions you asked were intelligent questions. They were well thought out. And at the end of that interview, I was really genuinely impressed. And I wanted to let you know you did a great job and you stood out from the rest. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, for me, it was like showing up to like the Mecca, like the track. I mean, I didn't, you know, you don't always want to just tell that to people, but you show up, you know, obviously you're the legend of judo in the United States. And so that was like, Boston is the Mecca. Right. I think that's where you travel to talk to the great. So the fact that you were kind to me just stuck with me for a long time. So it pays off to be kind to others, to give them a chance. Jimmy, thank you so much for giving me another chance and spending your valuable time. And you've also were kind enough to invite me to train with you today at your dojo. So I can't wait. Let's go. Let's go do some judo. Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jimmy Pedro. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Bruce Lee. I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. much more physically demanding. And then rinse and repeat that six times or eight times in a night, they just got 40 minutes of intense randori. The person that was training with them that wasn't as good only had to do six or eight minutes of training the whole night, you know, so. It's so, it's so difficult because then you look at like the Russian national team and you have just the world champions and so, or you even have like, what is it, Tom Brands and Terry Brands in the wrestling system. You have like these people, it's a small group of people, but they're all some of the best people in the world and they're going head to head. And yeah, you don't necessarily get a good look kind of a variety of styles, but just the quality is there. And even that is missing for people your size in America, because that is so difficult to work with, which it makes Kayla's and makes Travis's story that much more amazing. You mentioned kind of picking whatever the set of techniques the athlete is naturally good at or prefers or whatever. How much specialization is there? Maybe if I give you like two choices, is it good to have like one throw and try to become the best person in the world at that throw, or do you want to have a bunch of stuff? Like a variety of throws? Well, for Travis, it was Ippon Seinagi, that was his main throw, right? But from that Ippon Seinagi, he had a variety of other attacks he could do, you know, that mixed it up so that you kept people guessing. Maybe it wasn't the Ippon Seinagi that was coming, maybe it was the Koshi Gruma that he did, or maybe it was the Ippon to Osoto that he did in combination. So you typically have one main throw that you do. For me, it was Tai Otoshi. For Kayla, it was her Ogoshi. For Travis, it was his Ippon Seinagi. But then you come up with a variety of other throws that you do from the very same grip. So whatever grip you take for your main throw, you wanna develop, you know, an arsenal of attacks that go in all different directions holding that same grip. So you keep your opponent guessing as to what's coming. You know, because if they're just sitting on one technique at the highest level of sport, with the exception of a few, right? We talked about Ono's Uchi Mata. With the exception of a few, most of the world catches on pretty quick on how to beat you. There is something to just sticking, making sure you really dedicate to the main thing. So for Travis, that would be like the main version of his Seinagi. Like really making sure you don't forget to really put in the time on that. Because I mean, one way to say it is that threat being dangerous opens up a lot of things. Right. But also, I don't know. I think I'm just, as a fan, I think it's sad when like elite level athletes in all like combat sports, kind of start taking their main thing for granted. Like they think, okay, I've figured that part out. Now I'll be working on all this whole system on variations, on different setups, on lefty versus, some like weird variation as opposed to, you know what? If you look at some of the best people ever, they seem to have not cared about variations at all. They're just like literally, they are more like Jiro James of Sushi and like fine tuning their ear, their ability to detect the minute movements that give you an opening on that main thing. And so the whole time you're just waiting for that throw, you're like dancing with the like little bit of pressure and like releasing the pressure, putting the pressure, maybe a little bit of off balance and finding like the right moment to strike and focusing on that. Again, maybe that's just like a romanticization of like the simplicity of that. Maybe it is kind of impossible to do that on a large scale, but I just, yeah, I don't know if you can comment on that, whether there is some value in still putting in like tens of thousands of reps on the main, main thing. Well, unquestionably that has to happen. You still have to drill your main throw and you have to fine tune it and continue to do repetition after repetition and throws on the crash pad or throws on the mat, moving around, just explosive movements doing your main technique. You're never gonna forget that and you're not gonna put it to the side and not practice it anymore. It still has to be part of your repertoire and part of your daily training, but you do have to evolve. And I think that's the sport of judo, makes you evolve. When I look at, we talk about Koga from before, right? And we talked about, he had a dynamic Ippon Seinagi that nobody could stop for years and years and years. But when people started to be unorthodox and come down his back and cross grip him and he couldn't get to the lapel, he had to come up with something else. And all of a sudden you saw Koga doing, now he did a Sode or now he did a Tomoe Nagi, which so he can, he added to his arsenal to keep people thinking, keep people guessing. So it's not, you're not just that one trick pony. They still couldn't stop his Ippon Seinagi once he got that grip. But if they stopped them from getting that grip or putting two hands on the gi, he had to go to something else. And that's what he did. Does Travis's or Koga's Seinagi make sense to you? That weird, so when I, Because split hip, split hip. So I don't know if you know this, but like I got into judo because of Travis. I watched him at 2008 Olympics and I was, there's something about like, just not the cockiness, but the confidence and just the refusal to quit, the refusal to just, that energy, whatever it connected with me is like, oh, that guy's bad ass. I want to be bad ass like that. And then I also there happened to be in my university judo and I got into it and just fell in love with the elegance and the beauty and the power of the sport. But also I started to mimic Travis's game, his and Koga's. And then the instructors I worked with, they said that's the wrong way to do it. And I always, I never found somebody that told me like, no, that's not the wrong way. There's a lot of ways to do it. And there's like the classic way and you have to understand it and you have to learn it, but this is not the wrong way. Cause I was trying to find somebody who understands this throw. Cause it was so beautiful at the highest level, especially with Koga, the way you're able, the quickness with which you can strike, the fact that you can stand on the feet and the elevation you can get and the power you can get has certain throws, just like Uchimata doesn't look powerful. It's just like, it looks effortless. But like the standing Seinagi with a split hip, it just looks powerful because there's a, you're like, you're stepping into them, you're lifting the opponent and they still have, they're not surprised, they're now like helpless. Right, their feet are fluttering in the air. And then there's just this pause and then just big slam. With the Uchimata, it's almost like you don't know what hit you. It's like Taitoshi is the same. It's almost like a surprise. Like, oh shit, I'm now on my back. And so I just love that throw, but like it didn't make sense to me. Like when trying to explain it to others, when trying to learn, it didn't make sense to me how it works. Does it make sense to you? It does. I was born a Judoka, right? So I've lived this stuff since I was an infant and I've seen every style and every technique. The split hip Saiyan Aiki is difficult to learn. It's harder to learn than the basic form, but it is powerful and it does, upon entry, both of your opponent's feet leave the mat at the same time. So you've got them. Once you enter, you've got them. You just gotta finish, right? You just gotta lock them and turn and go. So it makes sense to me. My dad did teach me how to do that when I was younger. Yeah, he wanted me to do a split hip. We have kids at the school today that we teach the split hip Saiyan Aiki, same way, because it is that dynamic, right? You don't drop to the ground and roll and turn. It's not the classic form where you're giving way to your opponent. It's actually, you go pick the guy up in the air and then you slam him, so. Okay, beautiful. So maybe on a small tangent, so we're talking about elite level athletes in terms of Randori, in terms of like drilling. For more recreational athletes, like, you know, I have personally that situation going on, but there's other people that are just recreationally training Judo. How do you recommend they improve Judo? Like if I wanted to compete a bunch and do reasonable with a particular set of throws, say the split Saiyan Aiki, so how do you do the Randori? Do you use a crash pad to get in reps? Do you, like, what do you recommend? So I guess there's two recreational people that we're talking about. One is somebody who wants to learn Judo and become good at Judo, but doesn't necessarily want to compete, but just wants to get better. And I think that there's not enough emphasis in this country on paying attention to that type of student. Everybody pushes them to competition. But in reality, there's a huge audience of people out there that would love to learn Judo and be very proficient at Judo and have the skills to go execute if they ever needed it. And there's a class and there should be a program for that athlete. And that athlete does not need to do Randori. Like the sport of Judo is physical enough where you're picking somebody up all the time and moving their body weight around the mat all the time, where you can get very physically strong, very physically fit. Technically, you'll be better than somebody that does Randori more than you because if you learn good technique and you learn the movement and you learn the feel and you learn the timing, you'll actually be a better athlete than the person that just focuses on Randori who does ugly technique and wins with force. So we have a recreational class at our school where they don't do any Randori. They have an option afterwards if they want to stay for 15 minutes or stay for 30 minutes where they can participate in Randori. But most of the adult students choose not to because they're already so tired from the other hour class. It's a good workout. Right, they're already dripping sweat. They're already like, if you work hard and drill hard, it's an intense workout, you're exhausted. So that's a specific set of program, I should say, at every academy. And then if you want to get good and you want to compete, then to me, once you have your techniques, it's learning how to implement a good gripping system to put yourself in a position where you can always dominate the grips, control the movement, initiate the reactions from your opponent, and then have the opportunity to attack and score. And I think that when people train with, or when they jump into a higher level of the sport of judo, all of a sudden the first thing they say is, I can't attack. I don't know how to attack. Because positionally, they don't know where to put their hands. They don't know how to hold the gi properly. They don't understand that they're, they have an inferior grip, and they don't know how to get into better positions so they can't attack. And that's a big part of the game that not a lot of people really understand. So you really, even for recreational competitors, you really need to have a gripping system. You need to understand the gripping system. If you want to win. I mean, if the goal is to go and compete, that's a different story. You're going, I don't have fun getting beat up or losing in competitions. I enjoy the... I don't even know if it's the winning or the losing. I don't think, I think this is what, because I competed a lot in both Judo and Jiu Jitsu, and in Judo, it feels like, because I didn't have a gripping system, it feels like you're not even playing Judo against the good black belts. You're, they're just, they're not, they're not even trying because they have, they get a certain kind of grip, and you just can't do anything. And I don't have a good answer for that. I don't even know what I'm looking for. And so it's not even fun. It's not like even losing. It's like, I don't know. It's like you didn't even show up to play is what it feels like. And it's not, and I think that is a big gap in knowledge, actually, in Judo schools, is the gripping part. When you first go out to do Judo, right? You, the first thing you have to do is you have to grab your opponent, right? And a lot of times I hear coaches say, get a grip. Just take a grip. Well, sometimes if you take a grip, you're in a worse position than not having a grip at all. And that's what a lot of people don't understand. Like if you hold the gi in the wrong way, your opponent can attack you, but you can't attack him. So why would you ever do that grip if it's only to your detriment, right? So that's, and the way you grip does set up what attacks you can do as well. So that is a huge part. And I'm not saying that you have to be 100% disciplined and only always outgrip your opponent and only be able to do throws when you have a superior grip. I'm just saying that to be able to put the grips together with the throws and understand the movements is gonna make you that much ahead of the game. So if we take a step to our previous discussion of going from zero to hero. So going from the early days through the teenage years to winning an Olympic medal. So we mentioned a lot of training, the dedication of the training, the competing, what other elements are there? The mental side is visualization, believing that you could perform at that level. So what else can you say about that? I think that comes at the highest level, the visualization, the success, that comes at the highest level. I think in the teen years, there's the experience, just plays a huge role in getting to train with other people. Like as Americans, we have to go train in Europe. We have to feel the European style of judo. You have to understand that physicality. They grip very differently. They put you in very unorthodox positions. And if you don't know how to deal with that, you get thrown before you even have a chance to try your own throws. So it takes a lot of that experience and understanding what's going on. And then you also need to get that physicality. You need to be strong and hard, I would say, by doing all those rounds with the Europeans. And at the same time, you need to go to Asia and you need to train in Japan because you need to feel that free flowing judo for your technical side. And I think that's one of the things that I was able to benefit from. My dad was a coach who said, ''Listen, I've taken you as far as I can take you. ''I want you to go to the next level.'' And he sent me to England with Neil Adams, who was an Olympic silver medalist and was a world champion, had a great ground game and was good at gripping and actually did Tai Otoshi, which is the throw I did. So my dad said, ''I want you to go learn from Neil.'' And I ended up going to England probably eight to 10 times in my career and spending a good amount of time there training at the Neil Adams Academy. He's now the voice of judo, Neil Adams. What do you make of that guy? Just a brief pause. He's like the, like Morgan Freeman is the voice of like March of the Penguins and any other nature documentary. And Neil Adams is, there's very few sports that have a Neil Adams, I would say, because he's legitimately, maybe like Joe Rogan is that from mixed martial arts. It's just like an exceptionally recognizable voice. He's really knowledgeable. Also the passion is conveyed so well. Like many times I'll watch just because he's talking. So who is he? Since you've gotten a chance to train with him, to learn from him, who is Neil Adams? He's a great friend of mine. He is? He's a mentor. Like I said, I lived and trained at the Neil Adams Club in Coventry, England since I was like 16 years old. I went and visited him for the first time. He's the one who originally taught me how to do jujigatami and the way that I do jujigatami. I trained with him. He was just retired. He was in his early thirties when I first went out there. And so I trained with him many times and over the years he was a mentor. Great person, cares about people, cares about the sport of judo, had a good little club that was a fitness club. And it was judo, it was fitness. It used to go there. I'd show up at that place at like seven in the morning. And the first thing we would do is we'd go for a run. And we'd either be running mountains or we'd be doing a five mile run or we'd be doing something at the park. We were doing sprints and buddy carries and all this stuff. And then at 9 a.m. we'd have a technical session with Neil Adams where he would, for an hour and a half, we would drill techniques and learn positions. And it was no randori. It was that sequential drilling that we talked about before, right? Where you're reinforcing your two or three attacks to set up your main attack. Or if you're on the ground, you're going through repetitions of certain movements. And then I'd spend all afternoon at the club, have lunch. I'd go do my weight training in the afternoon at that place. And then in the evening, we would either do randori training at the Neil Adams Club or we would all get in a car and we'd drive to another location and we'd go train at another club that might be an hour away. And there'd be 50 bodies there to train with. And each night we'd go to a different dojo. And so it would be all day at the club and I'd do that for like three weeks straight. All we'd do was train. Do you know how he became the voice of judo? Do you have an understanding of what he's thinking is around how much he dedicates to himself to just commentating on judo? I imagine the amount of research required, but also just like psychologically, just the excitement he has in his voice. It takes work to do that. Do you have an understanding of like what his vision is with that? He's always been a very charismatic, animated person, Neil. Very passionate and loud and funny. And the Brits are very funny to begin with. So he's very charismatic. But I think after coaching, he tried coaching. He coached the country of Wales for a while. He tried coaching stints in other countries. He didn't have a lot of success on the coaching side developing an Olympic champion. I know that was a goal of his that he was a world champion. I think it was 1981. He won two silver medals in the Olympic games himself. He went on to coach for a while and had some political issues with the country of England for a while. And then left England and went to Wales. And I think he had a coaching stint somewhere else as well. Didn't have a lot of success coaching in the sport with athletes, not at the highest level. Had a great national team and things like that. He was really good at teaching his technique to others because he helped me a lot. But running a program, I think was difficult for him. The boys not listening and not having that same kind of passion and intensity that he... And that's why I bonded well with him because I was all in, right? I went there and whatever he said, I did. I didn't care how hard, I didn't care how long. I just wanted to get as good as I could. And so that's why he was a good mentor for me. But now in terms of a commentator, he's very cerebral. He loves judo, he researches it nonstop. He's got that great voice and he knows how to bring life to the game. And that's what he's done. And now this is who he is, right? He does judo full time, this is his job. Can I ask you a small, before we return to the actual sport, the coaching and the sport, it's a bit of a political question. I did a whole rant before Travis episode. I love Neil Adams's voice. I love watching judo. And it's really disappointing to me that the IOC and whoever is responsible, I don't understand this, that they don't make it easy for people to watch the Olympics in replay for years after. Like I can't watch Travis's matches. I can't watch, like they make it very difficult to watch stuff online. So what happened is I uploaded the Travis Stevens episode and we talked about his Ole Bischoff 2012 match. And it was like one minute of like a small overlay of the video as we're talking through it, like stepping through it. And it got taken down immediately from YouTube, the whole four hour conversation because of that one minute little clip. And the way it got taken down automatically is because the IOC has that video uploaded. It's set to private, but it's uploaded. So like they have the video and they choose not to show it. It's not that they're asking for money or whatever. They're just not showing it anywhere. They're not showing it through their own service. Like an NBC Olympics or so on. There's just so many great human stories that the Olympics reveals. They're just not made easily accessible. That's the Olympics charter is you want to, I think the actual line is to ensure the fullest coverage and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic games. And it seems like to me as a fan of the Olympic games, we're not getting any of that. Do you have an understanding of why that is? Like why we can't watch Kayla's matches, Travis's matches super easily, even if we're willing to pay money for it. So you can't go on the International Judo Federation website right now and watch any of the Olympic footage? No, no, no. So the only thing they have is for certain, for example, Teddy Rene match he lost. Not available anywhere. Really? And that's like a dramatic thing. So the one thing they have is for certain sports at the highest level, like gymnastics, they'll have a highlight, which is the most frustrating thing to me. Because this is what I can't, I'm going to try to prevent myself from going on a rant. But people don't just want to see a two minute highlight of a historic moment. They want to see the buildup where the athlete is standing, the nerves, the fear, the confidence. You see the buildup to the event, say it's a gymnastic, whatever, floor routine. Like their name is announced, they're walking, the coat, then they cut to the coach, and the coach with anticipation, and then go to the athlete. You want the full 10 minute thing. You don't want a two minute highlight of what happened like last second or whatever. It's just like the magic of that full story. Like a lifetime building up to those 10 minutes, right? That's the magic of the Olympics. The both the drama and the triumph that happens in those moments. And the fact that you can't relive that. Like Travis had a bunch of those, right? Like he had a bunch of times he faced like world champions, he won and lost, and just, it's always close, it's always dramatic. And none of those are available except like maybe the one where he beat Armbard, or whatever the submission was, I forgot. The choke, yeah, the Georgian. But most things are not. Usain Bolt, the full races, not all of his races are available online. The race with the Italian winning the 100 meter track race, this Olympics is not only highlight is available from what I saw, I didn't look too hard. So like, but the fact that it's not super easily accessible if you're willing to pay money even, but probably should be for free, is heartbreaking to me. Because to me, the Olympics is like some of the best of humanity. Just like, again, the hardship they have to overcome. So like the losses are really powerful. Because it's such heartbreak, but it's also like the triumph. Where you're losing history. You're losing history is what you are, of all the magical moments of your sport, right? It's a sin. I got to blame it on television rights and money. That's what it comes down to. It's like billions and billions of dollars of television rights paid by NBC here in the United States and globally, whatever the main carriers are and all the other nations that are dictating what can be replayed and what can't. And that's what it comes down to. I made a DVD or a video when I first retired from the sport. It was called Fury on the Mat. It was kind of my story, right? And I did it with a friend who was a videographer and we grabbed a bunch of my old footage and Olympic footage and somebody said to me, you can't use that Olympic footage. And I was young and I had just retired. I said, what do you mean I can't use the Olympic footage? It's not the television footage. It's my buddy who filmed it with his own camera. It's my footage. Yeah, exactly. And then they said, no, if it has Olympics in it or it's anything to do with the Olympics, the USOC owns it. Yeah. I said, okay, well, they said, well, you should get to send it to them and let them review it. So I sent it to them and I got a bill back. I got a thing back that said, if you want to use this footage, it's going to be like $30,000. And I said, man, it's only like three minutes. I spliced it up as much as I could and I only have highlights in there. And then I said, come on. I went back and I negotiated with them. But at the end of the day, I still had to pay like $15,000 just to have a few minutes of footage in my own film. This is... And I'm thinking, you wouldn't even have that film if I didn't compete in it. You know, like you can't, you know. So it was a struggle. This is the different, like you have the same in Jiu Jitsu. There's certain organizations, IBJJF or like Flow Grappling and Flow Wrestling. I understand, I think when it's a business, it might make sense. First of all, you should actually be good at being a business and making money, which is why for me, the IOC doesn't make sense. Like it should be accessible, but it would cost money. I can't buy it. Like would I have to email them for this footage and pay $30,000? Yeah, yeah. No, but the question is, like the way you run a business is you make that frictionless. Whatever the money is, $30,000 or $30, you make it frictionless and easy to pay that money. But anyway, I understand why that might be the case with Flow Grappling, but to me, the Olympics is a special thing. For sure. It's like, like you said, it is history. Like there's not even, like even the world championships don't compare. I understand they're really important, but Olympics is history. And the stories should certainly belong to the athletes if they want to do like Fury on the Mat to do their own story, or like on a podcast to talk about the most tragic moment of their career. Do you have a sense of how that could be fixed or no? The only thing I could think of is, you'd have to go to the Olympic committee. The US Olympic committee is the place I would start because the US controls the worldwide market when it comes to television. We pay the most for our television rights. Our sponsors pay the most for their rights to be associated with the best team in the world, which is the United States, right? So all the money starts here. I gotta believe there has to be a way to get that footage that should be accessible to the sports themselves. I'm surprised it's not, but if it's not, then it's because of dollars. It's because people aren't, the sport itself is not willing to pay enough money to have it on its, accessible to its audience. It's too cost prohibitive for them to do it. No, but I think it's also, unfortunately, might be some mixture of incompetence and just an old way of doing things because there's a lot of money to be made on television rights where you live show the event, right? But what's not being leveraged is the huge amount of money that could be made on the replay. This is what people don't understand is, do you know how many times, just the tens of millions of times that people watch individual events years from now? You watch like all the videos on YouTube, they're still getting plays. Hundreds of millions of views on stuff that happened 10 years ago, 15 years ago. That's really powerful and there's a lot of opportunity to make a ton of money. So it's not that they're necessarily greedy. They're also just not good at being greedy. I get what you're saying. Yeah, it's not the tradition. Think about it though, it's not traditional, right? For television studios, it's nontraditional to go to online streaming, to online access to information. It's not hard, right? Because everybody's doing it now, but it's not typical. Yeah, so it requires for the IOC to operate outside their comfort zone. Well, I definitely hope that's the case. And since Travis's video got taken down, it's obvious they have it.

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