Word: judo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...JUDO When she was a teenage schoolgirl with an 84-match unbeaten streak, judo master Ryoko Tani was known as Ryoko Tamura; she changed her name last December when she married Japanese pro baseball player and fellow Olympian Yoshimoto Tani in a $3 million Paris wedding that was televised across Japan. Tani's popularity in her home country is as outsized as she is pint-sized, but that only makes the gold-medal pressure on the 1.46-m judoka all the more intense. She was upset in the 1992 and 1996 Games, having to settle for silver on each occasion...
...female judoka of her era. A heel injury suffered just a month before the Olympics will make her quest for another gold the most difficult of her career, but Tani's competitiveness has trumped physical pain repeatedly in the past. "She is a born fighter," says Yasuhiro Muto, a judo writer for the Tokyo Chunichi Sports newspaper. "She is a contestant who hates losing. She changes color when it comes to a match...
...Still, Inoue professes to care less about medals than what he calls "ultimate judo." "I believe from now on I have to do judo as only Kosei Inoue can," he says. "I am thinking of doing my own judo, to create a new one." And when he finally achieves that? "The moment I do will be the time for retirement...
...TAEKWONDO Japan will always have some of the best judo masters in the world, but their pre-eminence pales when compared with South Korea's supremacy in Taekwondo. Even though the sport has eight weight classes in the Olympics, each qualifying country is allowed to send only four athletes at most, presumably so Koreans can't monopolize the medal stands. For most South Korean Taekwondo fighters, then, the real challenge isn't just earning the gold: it's defeating fellow countrymen to qualify for the Olympics in the first place. Four years ago, for example, heavyweight Moon Dae Sung missed...
...convinced that their genes prevented them from winning high-piston track events like the sprints or hurdles. Conventional wisdom held that the limber, compact Asian body was better designed for sports that required dexterity and precision. Hence China's dominance in gymnastics and diving, Japan's killer hold in judo or South Korea's command over archery and Taekwondo. Asians sometimes performed respectably in middle- and long-distance track competitions, but there was a tendency to chalk this up to mental toughness, not their natural physical gifts. "Asians are not as inherently talented in sports that require speed, energy...