Judo Tournament

Woke up at 6AM yesterday to go to a judo tournament yesterday and... well, my club got its collective ass handed to it. The first guy lost in the groundfighting (far left. He's the one making funny faces and lying on his back), one guy won two matches before losing to a joint lock (at right, reading the information booklet), and two of our girls lost to good throws.

I didn't get any particularly good pictures of Reika's match, but you can see at left Shoji Erica losing about five seconds into her match to a nearly perfect tai-otoshi. Ironically, that's Erica's best technique.

I don't remember exactly what happened in the other two matches, but Tasku used his zombie-style gripping technique. I dunno if it works or not, but it sure is fun to make fun of. At right.

Last up are two random pictures of some nicely (not quite perfectly) executed throws that had no relation to my club members at all, but look cool anyway.

If you look closely at the second one, you'll see that there's one foot and one face on the ground.

I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but it was a pretty big tournament by my standards. I figured it would be, at most, 60 people or so. I think they had that many people in each of the four divisions. There were two weight classes (big vs not) and it was separated by gender as well (figure it out). I thought the white stripe in women's belts was to indicate that they had achieved a partial rank, but it's apparently so they can tell the difference between women and men. It pleases me to know that they need help in this endeavor. There were plenty of really cute girls, by the way.

I took a couple of panoramas so you can see more than just two people at once, and I think they really help to show the scale of the event. I'm not certain how they're lined up, but they didn't seem to have any problems finding their places. I already counted the edges, and it's a 21x12 (ish) square, which would put them at about 250 people. Surprisingly accurate with my 4-times estimate from earlier.