Italy has a strong team, a mixture of experience and youth. Do you believe the Italians will perform well at the Olympic Games?
As I have already explained, the magic is in the DNA of the Italians. When we are really up against it, it is time for the best things to happen. So it is in life, as it is in sport! Each competition is a separate matter and the Olympics is a ‘super-competition,’ or better a ‘super world championship.’ Basically, you can win the continental championship or maybe the world championships and still not win the Olympics. The opposite can also be true.
I will mention Ezio Gamba, who has never won a world championship but brought a gold medal hone from the Games in Moscow (1980) and a silver from the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. On the contrary, Neil Adams, also born in 1958 like Gamba, won various world and European titles but no Olympic gold medal.
I believe that the Olympics is the ‘super world championship’ where only the first in the continentals and world championships should compete. Competition days would be shorter for the more popular, major sports, such as athletics and swimming and for judo too, making space for new sports disciplines that are appearing in the whole university of sport. An Olympic gold medal, that is the dream!
How do you see the future of judo and the world in the coming months and years?
Will it be the utopia of rebirth?
So Jigoro Kano's educational proposal was buried. At the end of the war, with the United States and all of Asia aware of the atrocities committed during World War II, a moral proposal concerning education, formulated by Japan, could not be considered by the new world order. The founder's books also disappeared in Japan and judo was spread mainly through military sports structures, all over the world.
Today the world has rediscovered Kano's proposal. Let's say that Italy has earned some credit by translating all pedagogical dialogue, to arrive at the creation of an education system that is not at the service of partial ideologies.
Kodokan judo, interpreted as an idea of judo-education, has structured organisations in European countries, which today give life to national and world championships.
We believe that Japan is expanding this initiative, because the competitive activity aimed at educational purposes, is useful to young people. The aims of judo education are to involve other disciplines, to shift the balance of the world towards ‘being all together, in an intelligent way.
It has been said that the future is a dramatic confrontation between education and chaos.