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Wrestler Saori Yoshida, who won her fifth straight world title this year and stretched her winning streak to 115 matches, was named the winner of the Grand Prix of the 57th Japan Sports Awards, it was announced Thursday.
Yoshida became the first female wrestler to win the award, chosen unanimously from among individuals and teams nominated by 49 national federations by a prestigious panel of 15, which includes IOC vice-president Chiharu Igaya and IOC member Shunichiro Okano.
Yoshida will receive 2 million yen and the Japan Wrestling Federation 3 million yen at a ceremony on Jan. 28 in Tokyo. The Japan Sports Awards are sponsored by The Yomiuri Shimbun.
Yoshida became third wrestler overall and first since Shozo Sasahara in 1956 to win the award.
Others nominated included Reiko Tosa, the world bronze medalist in the women's marathon; Asian Champions League winner Urawa Reds; world champion figure skater Miki Ando; and teen golfer Ryo Ishikawa, who became the youngest-ever winner of a pro tour event.
NEW DELHI: 12/21/7
In the freestyle category, six Railways wrestlers including Sushil Kumar (66kg), the lone Olympic quota wrestler so far, won gold medals.
Railways had 65 points, while Punjab finished second with 40 points and Haryana was third with 35.
In the Greco-Roman style, Railways won four gold medals, but missed out on the team championship to Services.
Haryana won the women’s championship with three wrestlers taking gold medals.
The results (winners only): Men: Freestyle: 55kg: Kripa Shankar Patel (Rlys); 60kg: Krishan Kumar (Del); 66kg: Sushil Kumar (Rlys); 74kg: Ramesh Kumar (Rlys); 84kg: Narsingh Yadav (Rlys); 96kg: Anil Mann (Rlys); 120kg: Rajeev Tomar (Rlys).
Greco-Roman: 55kg: Joginder (Rlys); 60kg: Ravinder Singh (Rlys); 66kg: Gurvinder Singh (Pun); 74kg: Rajbir Singh (Rlys); 84kg: Manoj (Ser); 96kg: Anil Kumar (Har); 120kg: Dharmender (Rlys).
Women: 48kg: Nirmala (Har); 51kg: Neha Rathi (Har); 55kg: Kamlesh (Har); 59kg: Alka Tomar (U.P.); 63kg: Jyoti (Del); 72kg: Babita (U.P.) — Principal Correspondent
Talk about a heavy burden.
Determined to make Japan's team to the Beijing Olympics, Ayako Shoda has entered the 72-kilogram weight class at this weekend's All-Japan wrestling championships--three divisions above her normal category of 59 kgs.
Shoda, the 2005 and 2006 world champion at 59 kgs who finished seventh at this year's worlds, will try to dethrone Kyoko Hamaguchi, who has maintained a 12-year stranglehold on the heaviest class in women's wrestling.
The three-day tournament, serving as a qualifying meet for the 2008 Olympics, begins today at Tokyo's Yoyogi No. 2 Gym. In women's wrestling, Japan's Olympic spots have all been filled except in the 72-kg class, which will be contested on Sunday.
The Japan Wrestling Federation had set the criteria that a gold medal in the four weight classes on the Olympic program at the world championships in Baku in September would mean an automatic ticket to Beijing.
Sisters Chiharu and Kaori Icho, at 48 kgs and 63 kgs, respectively, and 55-kg queen Saori Yoshida, all won golds. Only Hamaguchi, the 2004 Olympic bronze medalist, failed to win a title, leaving the 72-kg spot open.
It will not be Shoda's first time to take up a weighty challenge. Knowing that Kaori Icho, the 2004 Olympic champion, would likely win the world gold and sew up the berth to Beijing, she moved up to 63 kgs at last year's All-Japan tournament.
But Icho proved to much to handle and beat Shoda, who was allowed to enter a playoff to enter the world championships at 59 kgs and defend her title. However, she lost in the third round and finished seventh.
With Manteca Unified School District finals in full swing today, Dec. 21, East Union, Sierra and Manteca wrestling programs will be unable to attend the prestigious Western Invitational at Modesto Junior College today and Saturday.
Sierra will instead send its wrestlers to the 17th-annual Lynn Dyche Classic on Saturday in San Jose. The tourney is comprised of a 24-team field, made up mostly of Central Coast Section programs.
East Union will prepare for its third-annual Lady Lancers Girls Wrestling Tournament on Saturday, Dec. 29. The site is a hotspot for many of the state’s top girls wrestlers and often sees participation from state- and nationally-ranked grapplers.
Both East Union and Manteca will wrestle in the Demolition Day Tournament at Stagg High in Stockton on Jan. 5, before the inaugural Big Valley Tournament at the Stockton Arena on Jan. 12.
Sierra will compete in the Gordon Hay Invitational in Calaveras on Jan. 5 and the Lloyd C. Engel Tournament at Escalon on Jan. 11 and 12.
China yearns for gold medals but is likely to trail U.S. at Olympics
Published: December 20, 2007
The beans are out of the bottle," the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming said during the last Summer Olympic Games, in Athens in 2004.
Yao was talking from a great height about his country and sports, and although a little got lost in his translation, the essential did not: China was inexorably becoming an international powerhouse, closing fast on the traditional Olympic heavyweights after long settling for piling on the heavy medals in table tennis, diving and badminton.
One of the big questions in 2008, with the Beijing Olympics marked in bold on most sports calendars, is how far Chinese sports have truly come, and whether enough beans have been spilled for them to finish on top of the medal count for the first time.
Medal counts are no longer as rife with meaning as they were during the Cold War or at the 1936 Games in Hitler's Berlin. But this will be a deeply symbolic occasion for renascent China, and sports officials in other countries are bracing themselves - at least publicly - for a Chinese medal festival, which might also be a clever way to take the pressure off.
"It's no secret that we're more than an underdog; they are blowing us out of the water in the gold-medal race," Jim Scherr, chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said in August.
In February, the British Olympic Association released a projection that, based on 2006 results in international competitions, China would win 11 more gold medals than the United States, which would be in second place.
But less than a year later, the picture is not nearly that clear. After analyzing the world championship results from 2007 in Olympic disciplines, it appears that the Americans, who have led the medal count at the past three Summer Games, still hold a slim advantage over the Chinese.
It is not always possible to compare apples to apples in the projection game. Some world championships do not use the same weight classes as the Olympics, as is the case with tae kwon do and women's freestyle wrestling. Tennis does not have a world championships, but it does have a series of important tournaments and a computer-ranking system.
But according to my best estimates, based on major results or rankings across all sports in 2007, the Americans would have won 45 gold medals to China's 41. The United States would also have won 99 overall medals to China's 91, with Russia winning 91 medals, too, 34 of them gold.
Those numbers do not take into account the likely boost that competing in front of home crowds will provide to the Chinese. And they cannot take into account the possible breakthrough performances that will come from a generation of young Chinese athletes specifically trained to reach the elite level in 2008.
But it is difficult to believe that the Chinese could make a huge leap beyond those projected numbers, which already represent a major improvement over the Athens Games. In 2004, the Chinese finished second in the gold-medal count, with 32 to the Americans' 35, and were third in the overall medal count, with 63.
U.S. Olympic officials are not the only ones dampening expectations.
"We have never said that we wanted to take first position of the gold medal table," Cui Dalin, vice president of the Chinese Olympic Committee, said in Beijing last month.
"It is unrealistic for us to earn more gold medals than the United States, which has won more and more golds in major international competitions in the past three years, so I have to say that the gap between China and the United States has been even larger."
That sounds too pessimistic. The American edge in 2007 came on the strength of its athletes' performances at the world swimming championships in March in Melbourne and at the world athletics championships that ended in early September in Osaka, Japan.
China underwhelmed at both those big events, winning only a silver and a bronze at the swimming and then winning a gold, silver and bronze at the athletics, with Liu Xiang coolly handling the moment to win the 110-meter hurdles, just as he is expected to do at the Olympics inside National Stadium. Still, those five Chinese medals don't count for much compared with the 62 won by the Americans, seven alone coming from the swimmer Michael Phelps.
But the Americans will need a repeat performance in Beijing if they are to compensate for Chinese superiority in many other disciplines, some of them traditional Chinese power bases and some not.
As for tradition, the Chinese swept all the gold and silver medals at the 2007 world championships in table tennis and also won four bronze medals. The decision to replace men's and women's doubles with new team events for the Olympics will reduce the Chinese medal haul, and one of the toughest decisions any coach will have to make next year is picking which three Chinese men get to play in the Olympic singles.
The Chinese also won gold in seven of the eight Olympic categories in diving at the world championships in Melbourne. In gymnastics, they won five gold medals and eight total medals at the 2007 world championships and are in position to have a memorable duel with the American women in Beijing.
Now for where they have improved: shooting and weightlifting (where they were already world-beaters), and boxing, rowing, judo and trampoline (where they were not).
At the last world shooting championships, held in 2006 in Croatia, the Chinese won five gold medals and 12 total medals in Olympic events. At the 2007 world championships in weightlifting, they won seven golds, with the Chinese women coming close to a sweep.
The Chinese won their first Olympic boxing medal ever at the 2004 Games, when Zhou Shiming won a bronze in the light flyweight division. Three years later, at the world championships in Chicago, Zhou took the gold and four other Chinese fighters won bronzes.
In rowing, the Chinese won no medals at the 2004 Games but won a gold and a bronze in Olympic events at the world championships this year.
Clearly, the carrot is working, and if the Chinese can find a way to improve on their track team's or swim team's performance next year (or if Phelps, notoriously clumsy on land, trips over a curb and breaks a leg), then they might lead the medal count after all.
It bears remembering that the Chinese briefly dominated women's swimming in 1994, before allegations of systematic doping proved entirely founded. They have never come close to those results again, and the same is true of women's distance running.
But it is exceedingly hard to see why the Chinese would want to cut corners institutionally or pharmacologically this time. A major doping scandal would seem the last thing they would want to risk as they put down the drawbridge and invite the world into the new, wide-open-for-business China, which remains, conveniently or inconveniently, a Communist oligarchy and has a pollution problem to boot.
The best guess here is that Phelps and the United States finish on top again in 2008, leaving 2012 in London as the time and place to count the beans.