Richard here!
Finals results for today!
Ind male -60kg (Domdjoni, Crotia)
Ind male -65 (George Kotaka, USA)
Ind female -53 (Fujiware, Jpn)
Ind female -60 (Sobol, Russia, she just beat Nassim Varasteh of Canada I think 2-0)
Female Open (Yuka Sato JPN, my friend, who coaches at Teikyo High School not from my school, Seiritsu)
Male Open (R.Aghayev, Azerbaijan)
Aghayev was the most exciting to watch, especially due to his high spirited fighting in the open when he is smaleler than me.
With Kenji working during the morning, Estevan relied on me much more so it was interesting to see how the officials and staff reacted to my instructions be passed along.
It was kind of fun to use the staff communication radio ear piece I was wearing to get people to do things. I would simply touch the ear piece and say to someone, like a coach not sitting down, that the main table was talking to me via radio into my ear to ask the coach to sit down when actually no one was talking to me at all! Oh, I didn't abuse this new found power but it felt good to use it for the right purposes.
Lawrence came to help me out today, which was great since we could get twice as much done, since the Japanese staff, as nice and hard working as they are, didn't seem to be as busy as us, probably because the WKF tournament staff could talk to us directly.
The actual competition was of course interesting, again to see how much the refs didn't score and how well most athletes knew the rules, especially not to cling as to not draw a penalty.
LL and I had dinner with Oliva Sensei, his wife Carmen, my friend from Shiga prefecture Koichi Nakano, Arakawa Sensei and Koichi Tokyo friend koki and his office worker Sachiko. It was a wonderful talk, full of Oliva Sensei's analysis plus the fact that karate should be about the heart. For example, the countries that tend to do well are poorer and the athletes have to be very strong willed to win, compared to the richer countries where the athletes are softer. Maybe the poorer countries had a weaker understanding of technique years ago, but this has changed. Eastern Europe, Middle East in some parts and South America produce talented athletes nowadays.
The ninja demo on Thursday and the Japanese dancing demo tonight were sub-par I thought, and he agreed saying he expected something more sophisticated than tacky.
Ok, I'm falling asleep, it's 1:30am and I'm in Lawrence' room to catch some sleep as he lives 9min from the Budokan by train and we have to be up in 4hrs! Last day, the heavy weight divisions!
Richard
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