by Cichorei Kano Sun Jun 02, 2013 8:03 am
seatea wrote:
I think many of the new rules are ridiculous but I agree with much of this video, especially regarding the IJF competition circuit and it's quality broadcasting--there is always a high-level tourney on soon which you can watch live (and free) on YouTube or see a half hour long highlight programme with commentary from Neil Adams.
One question to ask though is who still even wants to watch ? A major difference between 20 years ago and now is indeed the availability of this kind of thing, but another difference is that many among those who 20 years ago was eager to watch just is no longer interested in watching. It's actually worse than that. I used to attend every world championship eager not to miss an important contest. 2009 was the first World Championship I ever attended where I was so bored, I'd sometimes rather stay at my hotel room working on my computer, or talk to people, or walk around. There wasn't even any judo atmosphere anymore. It was a sterile, disco-like light show, just plain weird. Distance between mats and audience was way too large, etc. It's not the first time some of these problems happen. The oddity is that both the exciting 1981 World Championships and the disastrous 2009 World Championships played in the same country (Maastricht vs. Rotterdam). The 1981 European Championships in Vienna too had a big problem as the tatami were separated from the audience by an indoor cycling track, and that distance too destroyed the atmosphere, but at least there was still some really exciting judo going on from the likes of Parisi, Adams, and many others.
There is also a far less strong identification of people with a particular judoka, with only a few exceptions like when someone is on track to win the first gold ever for a country like in the case of Kayla/US, which probably was a special case also due to its particular history. In the 1980s though EVERY judoka wanted to see Adams, Kashiwazaki, Gamba, Yamashita, etc. Now, it's really only youngsters who either weren't born yet or too young in those days and for whom today's judo is largely the only type of judo they have ever known. I don't have statistics, I can't offer hard proof of that, but it's largely what I understand from many contacts, and from having perceived some of that while present.
I still have hundreds of hours of tape of contests (from preliminaries all the way to the final, full contests, not just highlights) from the 1970s and 1980s mainly European Championships and World Championships. Maybe if ever I have a lot of spare time I should digitize that and see if I can make that available via YouTube or something, because there is really very little of that currently on YouTube, except for some brief sequences often in poor quality.
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