“Mixed Martial Arts is not a sport, sets a bad example for children and does not have human values” According to the president of European judo who told BBC World Service Sport.
The city of Glasgow recently lost the right to host the European Judo Championships because of British Judo’s collaboration with MMA.
According to European Judo Union president Sergey Soloveychick (Lft on the picture):
“MMA is not a sport, it is some kind of show,”
“Sport should have some human values and sports should help society develop human values. With MMA, it is not so.”
“It’s not good if your opponent is on his stomach and you sit on him and beat his head.
“It’s not good for the education of the young generation, so we don’t like to promote this kind of organisation during our competition. The spirit is to destroy your opponents by different ways and this is not good.”
Sergey Soloveychik on left
AnnMaria De Mars is an American Judoka. She was the first American to win at the World Judo Championships, winning the 1984 tournament in the -56 kg class. She is the mother of Ronda Rousey, an Olympic bronze medalist judoka and mixed martial arts Bantamweight world champion.
She talked to MMA Fighting about the reason for Judo’s rejection of MMA and of Judo’s falling number of practitioners over the years in the USA. In France, The French Judo federation, which has 500,000 members (80% are children under the age of 12) is losing 70,000 members per year that are moving to other sports:
“I think judo is full of people who have enormous egos and minimal talent. In the U.S., it’s not a very hard sport to be in the top ten or so because there’s just not very many people. It was always that way and even more in recent years.
“And they’re threatened because here comes MMA, which people have the opportunity to make money in it. They have the opportunity to make a living off of it. That’s one reason they’re threatened by it,”
“The other reason is judo – and probably a number of the martial arts are like this – because they have this belt system, you get people who get together and vote you’re a sixth-degree black belt. Then you go around and shove your chest up because you’re a sixth-degree black belt. In MMA, you can’t get anyone’s vote that you’re a world champion. You have to win it or not.
“I think you have people who have this limited little fiefdom, but it’s all they’ve got and they’re protecting it,” she claims. “People don’t want to lose their monopoly. They don’t want anybody infringing on their turf. All they have is these athletes who get very, very little money, if anything. You have these people who are not making very much money and along comes the UFC with the opportunity to do a great deal more and they’re protecting their assets.”
