Rena Kanokogi with her gold medal - one she should have won in 1959
The New York Daily News has an interesting profile of a Brooklyn woman who was stripped of her first place medal in judo after judges realized she was a woman competing against men. (And beating them - which I suspect was the real issue.)
[Kanokogi] vividly recalls the moment she took on her opponent in the New York State YMCA judo championships.She was an alternate, and had to step in when a male team member was injured.
Although women were not explicity barred from the YMCA contests, no female had ever tried to take part. Because her hair was as short as a boy's and she had an athletic build and tape around her breasts, Kanokogi's gender wasn't questioned until she won her fight - and her team won the contest.
She was pulled aside and forced to admit she was a woman or else her teammates would have been stripped of the title.
"It was very demeaning, painful," she said.
Now, fifty years later, the medal that was taken from her in 1959 has been restored. The New York State YMCA gave her the medal last week to make amends, and to honor a lifetime of work on behalf of women and sports: After losing the medal Kanokogi went on to fund the first female judo world championships and worked to get women's judo into the 1988 Olympics.
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It's amazing that she continued on after such a humiliating experience to work on the behalf of other women in her field. Meloukhia linked this to me for my new series, Success Sunday, yesterday. I was going to write about her next week, but I guess I've been beaten to the punch!
I love this--congratulations Ms Kanokogi! And props to all the badass women out there like her.
Next: getting women's ski jumping recognized by the IOC.
"But... men aren't as athletic as women, it's not fair to men to be pitted against someone who was born female!" Now there is something you'll never hear. Even though the result is the same as far as medals getting taken away, if a woman beats a man it was a fluke, where if a man beats a woman it's because men are better at athletic activities, duh.
Maybe people should just admit that there are women who can beat men quite a few sports.
Anyway, good for her! And so glad they finally came around and gave the woman her medal. Who knew a vagina could determine whether or not you deserve a medal for winning?
I take part in tkd and karate and am not very familiar with judo as a martial art. It seems like judo focuses less on power of attacks and more on stability and balance and reflexes. Therefore, it doesn’t appear to be that women would have any disadvantage at all, if they sparred with men around the same weight range. Since women are often shorter, they would seem to have a lower center of gravity, and it would be an advantage. So would it be possible that judo is a good sport for basing sparring matches just on weight, rather than sex? Anyone who has done judo can weigh in on the matter?
It's been a long time since I last set foot in a dojo, but this is what I remember—how well we did in sparring did tend to depend on reflexes and quick thinking. Weight might not be a particularly good guideline for basing sparring matches on, though; I was one of the better students in the class, but I distinctly remember a few times when my own weight and strength were used against me by my opponent when I went in for one kind of throw and—whoops!—the person I was sparring with used my momentum to land me flat on my back (well, as flat as the way we learned to fall would let me be, anyway) with another throw.
Judo is a really intense sport (I use the term sport, because Karate is termed an "art" and therefore not in the olympics). Basically, you get points by putting your opponent in locks, holds, and I think you win if you flip them on their back.