Neil Adams Still Wakes in a Sweat From an Olympic Final He Cannot Reach

Lex Fridman introduces Neil Adams as a judo legend: world champion, two-time Olympic silver medalist, five-time European champion, and the voice who narrates the sport's biggest wins and worst turns. Adams was first reserve for 1976, not quite old enough, and arrived at Moscow 1980 after four years of buildup, hungry and sure he could conquer the world. He had spent 1979 at 78 kilograms, lost nothing, and beaten everybody. Then he dropped back to 71 because he was seeded in the top four. It was, he says, probably the worst decision he made. The only contest he lost that year was the Olympic final.

The cut was brutal because the body was still going up — 73, 74, 75, a kilo a month — not hovering in the middle. A month or two before the Games he was really hurting. He won the European Championships at the higher weight, and the people on that podium were the people on the Olympic podium. Nutrition, he says now, was appalling. Sport dietetics was not sitting on the shelf the way it is now, and if anything besides a terrific opponent lost him that final, it was what he ate. He had a sweet tooth and not much money. Conditioning and judo training were ahead of their time. The food was not.

None of the fights before the final went the distance. He remembers tai otoshi, uchi mata, and a juji-gatame roll to armlock the East German Krueger in the semifinal — textbook Japanese judo, flying through. The final was Ezio Gamba of Italy, a lefty, which Adams still hates. Left-handers, maybe 30 percent of people, spend their lives against the 70 percent who are right-handed; right-handers almost never see the angle they want. There was also an eight-hour gap from semifinal to final, a trip back to the village, and a second warm-up. He lost his momentum, spent half the match trying to rescue it, and stayed half a step behind. It ended on a split decision, and it is still on his mind.

In the early days Adams did not think it was possible to lose. He walked into every contest expecting to win, so the surprise when he did not was itself the wound. He did not lose many: European finals he never lost, seven golds if you count two junior titles with the five senior ones, and only two contests on a split decision. The ones that got him were World Championship finals and Olympic finals. Fridman asks the blunt question: love winning or hate losing more? Adams barely pauses. He hates losing more, but he also loves winning.

Fridman reads from the 1986 book *Neil Adams: A Life in Judo*. Ever since Adams could remember, he had wanted to win — not the sack-race feeling, not even a young swimmer's winter mornings, but a desire as much a part of him as his arms and legs, not learned. That competitive instinct, the book says, is the greatest difference between the public warmth and the view from inside. Adams says it is not far off. He has calmed the strut. He is better at masking the will. It still bothers him as much. His son loves playing him at bowls because he cannot throw a straight one, and that bugs him — not the score, the fact that he is not good at it.

From 30, when he finished competing, to 40, he could still train with the best and go with anybody. Then hips, legs, and knees started to fall off, and he had to pick his practices. That rankled, because the competitive mind had not aged with the joints. He still likes to think he could cause Ilias Iliadis problems; at 60-something you last a minute. They have grappled in hotel gyms among the weight machines, two madmen in the middle of the room. At 17 Adams himself was sent to a senior European Championship and fought Nevzorov, then the world and Olympic champion. The shredded veteran expected to throw a skinny kid in a baggy gi. Adams worried him. A year later he was filling out. Two years later he was competing for an Olympic title.

After 1990, when the Soviet Union dissolved, wrestling styles poured into judo with a jacket on: leg picks, single-legs, double-legs. By 1995 the sport was bent over. The IOC told the International Judo Federation to change it or lose one of the two sports, because it looked like wrestling in judogi. Adams's slogan is simple: win by judo, not by wrestling. Banning the dive at the legs was also about stalling. Standing up brings the hips back into defense, the target moves, and the big throws return. Rules, he says, always dictate development.

Asked to explain judo to a five-year-old, he starts with the dojo. His grandsons, three and a half, used *dojo* as one of their first words, ahead of grandma and granddad. They take their shoes off. He tried to build his own hall with a feeling of reverence, the way he likes old churches without being a religious man. People fight, sometimes it turns into a brawl, and then they bow. Animosity after the bow is rare. That respect is not decoration. It is the sport's advantage as a way of life.

Plenty of people win World Championships and even Olympic Games. A great champion, for Adams, is somebody who does the right thing when they lose. When you see them lose, you see the true them. After Moscow and Los Angeles, the hardest thing was the microphone in his face, having to be respectful, and having to smile. Clarisse Agbegnenou is his example: five-time world champion, Olympic champion, back after giving birth, she lost a match on the way and told people not to be upset — one contest, next time she would put it right. She did, and she won the world title back. Those, he says, are great champions.

A year after Moscow, at 78 kilograms, he did not have to cut, and he walked into the World Championships with no doubt he would be champion. The leftover thought was only: do not make mistakes. From the commentary chair he can see a match change direction when someone who has been going forward starts trying not to lose. Great champions, Teddy Riner among them, keep putting it out there. Go ahead in the first minute with three minutes left, glance at the clock, and the defensive mode can lose the thing on penalties. When Adams coached, he tried to keep the positive attitude for the full four, later five, minutes.

The 1981 final was an armbar against a Japanese fighter who had just taken third at the All-Japan Championships, all weights, and who was a lefty besides. Standing, Adams changed direction four or five times, then went to the ground. Judo newaza at that level is the transition: ten or 15 seconds, 100 percent, like a sprint, then a decision, because if the forearms blow you cannot grip the jacket and they can throw you. As soon as he climbed the man's back he knew he would not let him up. A small voice said stick on him. The rest was pressure on the arm. The opponent bridged from turtle, trying to escape. Adams never let go.

How did it feel? Better for him than for the other man, he says — amazing, all the disappointments arrived at one point, at last Champion of the World. At 14 he had said he would be world champion and best in the world, with no idea how hard that would be. Fridman calls it the power and stupidity of youth: you go after it before you know, and then you are trapped into doing the work. Adams's first trip to the European Cadets in 1974 had already taught him there were other people out there. Unbeaten at home, he met fighters who treated him with total disdain. Gamba was one of the first who felt like another level. Adams had beaten him twice, including at the Europeans, then lost to him at the Olympics two months later.

The first time Adams fought Nishida of Japan in a major tournament, he felt the danger. In Europe he could go months without being thrown in training. In Japan everybody threw you. That edge, he says, puts a real sharpness on the judo. Fridman distinguishes the flavors: Eastern European gripping makes you feel screwed the whole way; good Japanese judo is a terrifying calmness, and anywhere you step you are getting thrown. Adams wanted a mixture, with gripping as the key. In referee seminars he used to ask officials whether they had ever gripped up with high-level players. If you have not, you do not understand why they fight for certain holds. When Iliadis puts his arm over your back, you know you are going up and over. It feels more powerful than it should.

At the Budokwai before the 1984 Games, British-American freestyle wrestler Noel Loban put a jacket on. Adams immediately caught the sleeve to kill the single-leg and double-leg, threw him a couple of times, then took the jackets off to reciprocate. Without the gi, Loban was a nightmare. The jacket is not clothing. It is the only tool, a way of establishing control whose physics Adams says is absolutely insane. When the rules later limited grips and piled on penalties, former fighters on the referee commission pushed to let them grip, because that is the game. Teddy Riner comes out, takes a sleeve, big arm over the top, and throws people. You cannot ban the hold of a six-foot-nine Goliath who is also skillful and has the mentality of a winner. Any grip is legal if you throw from it. Blocking out to farm penalties is not.

Adams was favorite for Los Angeles 1984 and got silver. Coming in he was tired, and he remembers thinking he just needed to get this over with and rest — the wrong attitude for an Olympic Games. He was winning, but with a struggle. Michel Nowak of France, one of the strongest physically, was a lucky quarterfinal he just about held. In the semifinal, Lescak took him the distance for the first time; Adams was just glad to get it done. The final was Frank Wieneke of Germany, a young man he had beaten before. From the start every technique was a little off, uncoordinated in a way he still cannot quite explain. He sees the same thing now in athletes going for a second or third Games, and he empathizes.

He dominated the final. Another minute and a half, he thinks, and he would have been Olympic champion. Wieneke faked a right uchi mata and turned to a left drop seoi-nage. Devastating is not enough, Adams says. Wieneke was jumping; later he called it just his good day. The German team doctor and coach came over afterwards and said only that they were really sorry. Three weeks later Adams beat him in the final of the German Open. It appeased nothing. Wieneke had more confidence and made it a tighter match. The gold-medal pressure of being favorite, Adams thinks, is something the great ones — he names Krpálek — keep coming through.

His wife Niki will tell you he has woken in sweats. After Los Angeles he drank too much, and looking back he sees that as the entrance to a dark period. The dream is always the same: he has a chance to put the Olympic final right, and he cannot get there. Traffic stops him, or something else does, and he wakes sweating, thinking that after all this time it is not possible. It is, and it happens. Then he says the other true thing. If winning that Games had turned his life so that he did not compete in 1988, did not meet his wife, did not have this family, he would not swap what he has now for anything. Olympic gold is just Olympic gold. He told Niki he did not want to be forgotten, so commentary and coaching would have to be done at a high level.

The book *A Game of Throws* has a chapter called "Lessons and Losing." Great champions, Adams says, are made of the people who handle it in the right way. Throwing the dummy out of the pram is picked up very quickly. It does not mean you have to like it. He did not. What matters is not all the contests they win. It is the one they lose, and how they pick themselves up after. He went through a later divorce that was really difficult on his son Ashley. Trust took a long time to come back. A lot of the bad decisions, looking back, were made in a fuzzy haze. He was a functioning drunk, still training most days, using the training to mask the drinking. He told Niki that if he was a drunk, he was the fittest drunk in the world. She said he probably was.

He had periods of depression, not that bad, he says, but anything that gives you an up gives you a bigger down, and he hated the feeling and hated himself for letting it happen. He has a bizarre ability to say stop. The incident was December 20, working for Belgium Judo, Christmas, he and a Belgian coach got hammered in the wrong place and got noticed. They pulled him up in front of a board, half of them people he did not respect or trust. He told them if they were going to sack him, sack him, but this was it: he would stop. He had decided. On the way home in the car he rang Niki and said whatever she heard now, he was going to stop. That was it. Stopped.

Advice, if the dark place is drinking: two days or a week in, you will feel a physical difference, and you will like it. If you are down all the time, find what is pushing you down and attack that. Someone once told him that whatever you have, someone else would live in your house, drive your car, eat the food you moan about. There is always somebody worse off. We look at what we have not got rather than what we have. The other hard stop in an athlete's life is deciding when to finish. After the 1988 Olympics the sponsors took the car and the funding within two weeks. First time he had to buy a tracksuit. The gym goes from six days a week to optional. Ryoko Tani never stopped; most people have to pick coaching or media. Commentary, for him, started by accident with a 1982 voiceover.

The early voiceovers were narration, not what people hear now. The intonation was different until it started coming from the heart and he got excited and did his thing. Timing came later: when to go in, when to come out, when to say something, when not. In the early days he wanted to talk all the time. You do not have to. Knowing when to shut up is the key. Part of the drama is in the silence, building up to the setup and the throw. There are two kinds of commentating, he says. You can commentate what you see, and you can commentate what people cannot see — the inner technical or tactical game. If you can introduce that, you have an advantage.

He is never really disparaging. If someone messed up, they know. He will say it was a great throw by the other guy, or a great match, and if they made a mistake he will say something that means something. He tries to talk the truth. Ninety-nine percent of athletes, he says, are grateful he commentated their fights all the way through. Later he adds that a massive throw now gets a celebration and then some empathy for the one who was thrown, because it is not the best feeling in the world, especially in an Olympic final. They always come up and say he commentated their fights. Fridman calls him the voice of the biggest triumphs and tragedies. Adams says, no pressure.

On JudoTV they pull up the 2024 Paris Grand Slam final. Fridman asks the ridiculous big question: greatest of all time? Adams splits it. Teddy Riner is the greatest judo winner of all time, of that there is no doubt — ten world titles, two Olympic golds, two bronzes, still going. Ask Riner if he is the greatest judo man and he would say no, Adams thinks, and he is not. There are people with more beautiful judo. He is the ultimate winner. He still lays it on the line. Smaller fighters give him trouble because he wants the sleeve and the big arm over the top. If the Olympic draw stacks two or three of those, it is by no means certain. He is still the favorite, and already the greatest competitor the sport has known.

Yasuhiro Yamashita, unbeaten in international competition, is Adams's greatest judo man: technical, spectacular, a student of fundamental principles, able to change direction completely when one side is closed. Adams trained with him over two years. Who wins Yamashita versus Riner? Yamashita, he thinks — strong words, Fridman says. Riner finds shorter people more difficult. If you asked Yamashita, he would be gracious about Riner. Watching the Paris final, the shorter Korean has a great day, two penalties each, golden score, and Riner turns it against the run of play. Even when he loses, Adams says, Riner is graceful. He does not like it. He is graceful.

Other names get the same split between medals and manner. Tadahiro Nomura never lost an Olympic fight, took two years off between Games, and still had to win the Japanese trials. Shozo Fujii, four-time world champion, greatest middleweight, never reached the Olympics because he lost those trials twice. Abe and Maruyama, both the best at under 66, were sent one to the Worlds and one to the Olympics and both won gold; their Kodokan trial went 26 minutes. Shohei Ono had the versatility — left and right, pickups, early wins on the ground — and Adams docks him for how he presents himself off the mat. Kids look up to these people. Being an ass is the worst thing. Koga, Inoue, Iliadis: the ones who only want to win by ippon, like Tyson stepping out so you knew what you were going to get. An open match is two people trying to score. When they close up, it is not exciting.

In Japan you feel the danger of being thrown, and the first defense is to stick the backside out so you are not in the position they want. Adams went there because of that feeling. In one Olympic cycle he went two years and two months without a score on him in any competition. Then a European Championships he still won scored on him three times in the first pool. He was devastated, more mortified about the scores than about the tournament, the two-and-a-half-year unbeatable story suddenly gone. He almost lost the whole thing and scratched to the final, which he won well. Danger brings out the best judo. It can also wreck the story you tell yourself.

At 16 he took a drumming from an older Japanese student with a gold tooth. Goldtooth became the nightmare. Adams kept coming out, crying, getting dragged away, saying no, wanting to go back. He returned to the same dojo every year. Morning, noon, and night, Goldtooth was on his mind. At 18 he was competitive, standing up with him. At 19, in a groundwork competition, the switch happened. He got the armlock and did not put it on immediately. It had to last. He spread the whole thing as long as he could, a long memory looking down. Fridman says Goldtooth probably has nightmares now. Adams hopes he remembers him.

Everyone who has been a world or Olympic champion and trained in Japan knows the rest: you get thrown by people who never come out as world champions, just in the mix through three years of university. One lunch hour a businessman arrived with suitcase and tie, changed, and worked his way through the whole British team, lined up. Adams threw him immediately, then had four minutes of being lifted, twisted, and thrown while the team laughed at the side of the mat. Ten minutes later the man was tying his tie, back to work. Adams imagines him at the office computer, and is glad he did not get out to compete.

His favorite of all favorites is Kashiwazaki, a judo genius, world champion the same year as Adams, two weights below. They watch the 1981 final: a sacrifice throw, straight into newaza against a strong Romanian, calm on the face, tying the arm, pulling the top leg, pushing the bottom one off with both feet, readjusting balance. The referee lets it go because something is happening. Job done. Transition is everything in judo, Adams says, because you have not got that long. Persistence on the ground is not accident. It is trained feel.

Teaching jiu-jitsu players in America, Adams heard we will never give you our back. Under judo rules, he said, certain throws leave it there: fail a seoi-nage and the back is presented. That is a different logic from pulling guard. Travis Stevens, a high-level seoi-nage man in judo, almost never used it in jiu-jitsu because a failed throw would give the back away without the same gi control. You learn the game in front of you. Wrestlers should learn judo as judo, then wrestling as wrestling. Georgians and Mongolians, denied the legs, put the arm over the top and ripped people off the floor anyway. Iliadis adapted in about a month. Rules change the path. They do not erase the style.

The interesting difference between the arts, from someone Fridman calls one of the greatest ever on the ground in judo, is timescale. Judo comes from standing, directly in, and the referee has to see the catch and the continuation. Plan A, B, C, D has to build quickly. Jiu-jitsu has more time, more patience, more places to relax and think, so it is much less exhausting. Judo is that ten-second blast, sprints, a special kind of conditioning, knowing when to go and when not. The side effect is aggression on the ground. Roger Gracie saw the importance of the throw for the entry, came to the Budokwai, and learned from Ray Stevens. Everyone knows what he is going to do, the way they knew with Yamashita, and nobody can stop it. He has a thousand ways into a few things he does extremely well.

Adams's own newaza came from a mistake. In 1978, fighting up a weight, he stayed in one position a second too long and got caught in sankaku, a triangle. He came off the mat and said the same sentence he later said about drinking: he was never going to get caught on the ground again. He never lost there for the rest of his competitive career. Judo pins, Fridman adds, make a person feel like a thousand pounds; it is weight distribution and change of balance, not mass. An alternate history has Adams in the early UFCs. A Gracie showed up at one of his seminars with cousins. Groundwork turned out to be the missing link, the neutralizer of size. The shock for judoka in MMA is getting punched in the face. Ronda Rousey and Kayla Harrison did not need to take many. They hate losing as much as anyone he knows.

Jimmy Pedro, who calls Adams a mentor, learned tai otoshi, juji-gatame, and a training method. Adams always wanted to train harder than anybody else; at 65 he still does an hour of physical work most days. He wanted ten who trained hard rather than one skillful prima donna. Pedro was the dream: when everyone was tired and sick of it, he was still there, pulling the others in. Bobby Berland, Michael Swain, Ed Liddie, the Americans flew in because they knew they would be dragged out. Full-time groups get the real advantage: skills in the morning, split from running, weights, and randori, instead of cramming everything into a club's hour and a half. If you do a skill 99 times incorrectly, repetition does not make perfect. It makes permanent. Adams oversaw footwork and gripping and corrected it live.

Half of teaching tai otoshi is training the partner to react the right way. Hands start every technique; kuzushi pulls them off balance; two legs across, back to the partner, legs flex as they come onto the back. Nine out of ten beginners get it wrong because uke leans back or panics. Teach the reaction first, then the throw. Japanese camps might do 50 or 60 randoris a week, four or five minutes, light enough that throw-for-throw is possible. Korea is more physical, so you die at 50 and do 30. Adams chased 40 to 50 a week in his club, then added camps. A lot of countries, he thinks, do not do enough judo because sports science has crowded it out. Nishida would finish a practice and ask for another; sometimes it became 15 minutes with a man who could throw you at any time. After a Czech Open final his forearms were so blown he could not shake hands or hold the medal.

Ten beginners in a room told to get on with it is mayhem. You need good instruction, a good club atmosphere, and a place that is not so intense that winning is the only thing. Ninety percent of people in martial arts are there for pleasure. Give them a mixture: a path into competition if they want, and fun for the rest, with a foundation, because the more success you have, the more you like it. Technique can get you away with murder for a while, including bad condition, but you get found out. The whole package goes the whole way. Audrey Tcheuméo had been doing judo eight years when she took Olympic silver in 2012, went off the boil, came back, and has now been at the very top for well over 13 years. Solid foundations last longer.

What stands out across the history he has called is Paris: an educated crowd on the mat, so loud he sometimes cannot hear himself when Riner walks out, and then the crowd silencer when their man goes over. France at home, he says, has the best balance of men and women across the weights. He still gets nervous. The Olympics will be played over and over, and he is more careful now, celebrating the throw and then finding a word for the person who was thrown. Fridman thanks him for talking. Adams says it has been an honor. The gold from 1984 is still in the dream. The man who cannot get there in traffic is also the man who would not trade the morning for it.