The Values of Judo in the 21st Century…

” Sport has become the language of the world, a common denominator that breaks walls and barriers … it’s a great tool for progress and development”, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said in a statement during a ceremony in Geneva, three months before the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. The celebration of the spirit of judo at the service of peace and development produces an identical discourse which affirms its supreme ambition in a maxim “mutual aid and mutual prosperity” and in a formula as evocative as it is enigmatic: “judo is more than a sport”.

A first question arises. Should we consider that there are invariant dispositions of human nature that lead to privileging the same values ​​regardless of the difference of epochs and cultural, political and social environments? To adopt this point of view would be to deny the mosaic of currents and specificities constructed over time, to apprehend judo only in an allegedly original and pure form.

The history of judo and its values ​​is made of continuities and breaks. I will only be interested here in the most recent, that of the beginning of the twenty-first century. This choice is justified by two main reasons. The first one is internal. It is linked to profound changes in the direction of world judo. The second one is external. It refers to the place that Judo occupies in its host societies, to the role it plays in practitioners’ daily lives.

The first element of rupture occurred during the 2004 Olympics in Athens. On the morning of the competition the twice Iranian world champion, Arash Miresmaeili, arrives at the weigh-in and the electronic scale displays 72.4 kg, a weight well beyond the limit of 66 kg in his category. Political diktat forbidding the athlete to face an Israeli opponent or health problem that resulted in accidental overweight? The international press seized the case. The whole world suddenly saw another facet of the Japanese method. Like other sports, judo has become an ideological vehicle.

Back in his country, Miresmaeili is treated as a hero and rewarded as an authentic Olympic champion. The cautious reactions or even the duplicity of some of the IFJ members at the time are denounced by the journalists. The suspension imposed on a South Korean coach for violently striking an eliminated athlete accentuates the distance to the education principles so frequently advocated. The time of values is suspended, put in parentheses, like a derisory bastion facing political and economic stakes.

The second element of rupture crops up three years later. It corresponds to the election of a new president of the International Judo Federation. The year 2007 is the beginning of a new era. It marks the alignment of judo on the model of the professional sport organized in circuit of international events putting judo performance in the spotlight.