Hate Losing More Than You Love Winning: Jimmy Pedro on Forging Judo Champions

Lex Fridman opens by asking Jimmy Pedro for the most beautiful throw in judo. Pedro does not hesitate: uchi mata. It has the most amplitude. A leg swings through the middle, the opponent goes head over heels, and at the finish all four feet are off the mat — two bodies rolling together, the thrower landing on top. It is also one of the hardest throws to learn. You balance on one leg, swing the other through, turn your back, pick the opponent onto the hip, and twist in the air. Fridman has never quite understood why it works. Pedro walks through the mechanics: pull the upper body toward you, send the legs the other way, catch the forward momentum, then finish the twist.

Who does it best right now? Shohei Ono, two-time Olympic champion at 73 kilograms, whose uchi mata looks unlike anyone else's and, Pedro says, cannot be stopped on the way in. Ono has maybe lost two matches in eight years. Is he the greatest of all time? The only reason Pedro holds back is Tadahiro Nomura, the 60-kilogram player who won three Olympic golds. Three titles in a lightweight division, he says, is spectacular. Fridman asks whether beauty and magic should count even without the medals — Toshihiko Koga comes up — and Pedro will not budge. Plenty of players have done spectacular judo. Greatness is the ability to pull it together at the World Championships and the Olympic Games, again and again.

He offers a counterexample from the 1970s and 1980s: a competitor named Fujii who won four world titles in a row when the worlds were every two years — eight years at the top — and never went to the Olympics. Then Fridman brings up Teddy Riner, ten-time world champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist, two-time Olympic bronze, probably the most dominant judoka ever. Pedro sat next to him on a bus. Riner's legs were the size of Pedro's waist; he is something like six-foot-eight and about 140 kilograms. Winning ten world titles is almost incomprehensible. Technically, Pedro does not put him with the most refined players. The real weapon is gripping. Heavyweights usually grab the gi and go man to man until the match gets sloppy. Riner controls position and movement the whole fight. He does not give opponents a chance to beat him.

Then Tokyo happened. After a streak of more than a hundred matches, Riner lost to Georgia's Tamerlan Bashaev. Pedro finds it sad. He likes seeing champions succeed, especially good people, and he thinks Riner is a humble people's champion whom the French federation has taken care of. A third Olympic title would have put him in infamy. Instead the great one fell, which is what the Olympics sometimes do. Staying that dominant in judo is brutally hard. One mistake, one ippon, and it is over. When you are the best, the entire world is training against you, studying patterns, hunting for a flaw. You carry the flag. The spotlight is on you. When the fight goes badly early, the favorite feels the pressure most — which is why, Pedro says, the other ones so often win it.

Fridman asks the big-picture question: from day one of judo class to an Olympic medal, what does it take, and how many paths are there? Pedro's answer starts with geography. An American, a Japanese athlete, and a European are on three distinct journeys. Japan is a culture and a system of excellence — elementary school, junior high, high school, college, Olympic team — much like wrestling in the United States. When a country is a factory of high-level athletes, the best come back as coaches at every layer, even elementary school. In that environment a national coach can sit back and watch who stands out.

America does not get to choose from a thousand nine-year-olds. Someone with a smile walks into the dojo and says they want an Olympic medal, and the coach has to craft whatever raw material they have been given. The odds are a very high hill. Only a few coaches in the country, Pedro says, really understand the process. You need a professional base early: posture, throwing methodology, newaza, fundamental standing throws. Gripping can wait a little. Most important is work ethic and a mindset of going to tournaments constantly, because American kids do not get enough adversity in the room. They have to get it in competition, expose the weaknesses, and keep patching them.

Until the teenage years they stay mostly domestic, training at least five days a week, living as normal kids. The real American failure is thirteen to nineteen. Up to that age, Pedro thinks Americans are on par with the world in technique and skill. Then Japan and Europe pour time, staff, and weekend camps of eight hundred to a thousand people into the teens. In the United States, wrestling offers a clearer college path and siphons talent away; judo's ladder is foggier. Fridman likes the purity of coach, athlete, and dream. Pedro is already looking at Los Angeles 2028. Now is the time to identify talent and get a seven-year commitment, because America will have a full team of fourteen, one in every weight.

At Pedro's academy the current group of thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds is, he says, really good. They randori five nights a week — Tuesday through Friday plus Sunday — with technical sessions on top. A technical session is an hour of repetitive throwing and drilling of the movements the American system cares about: newaza positions fifty times with resistance, details picked apart, then whole sequences they can move through quickly. The body hardens. After a long layoff the impact feels new again, which is why judo is hard to come back to. Hard training also makes weight stubborn; the body grows a layer of protection it does not want to give up.

Fridman describes high-level jiu-jitsu randori as a dance: moving at a hundred percent without forcing power, hunting timing and position. Pedro says that is the Japanese style of judo — two people in pajamas, minimum effort, maximum efficiency, clean throws. In Japan you can do fifteen five-minute rounds, seventy-five minutes of sparring, and survive. You will get tired and you will fall, but it stays free and technical. In Europe you would be hard-pressed to do eight. So much energy goes into fighting off the gripping system and the power that you are physically drained. Russia is the outlier: more active sequential drilling, fewer randori rounds than France or Germany.

To win at the Olympic level you need all of it: Japanese finesse, European physicality, and newaza, where a lot of the world is weak. For about twenty years Pedro's group has been building what he calls the American system of judo. Take whatever throws the individual already does, perfect those techniques and their combinations, then overlay an American layer of gripping, newaza, conditioning, mentality, training methodology, and game planning. That overlay is the secret sauce, because there is no way they have eight good partners in a night. They might have two. Four quality rounds, and the rest of the room does not push you to the limit. So they train differently.

The method is shark bait. When Kayla or Travis was preparing, the gym might have twenty people total. Four of them Travis's size; maybe one woman in Kayla's class, so she trains with men; the rest too small. They line up four or five people who can actually challenge them, a minute each, five minutes straight as hard as they can. A partner can go a minute with Travis. They cannot go five. Rinse and repeat six or eight times and the star has forty minutes of intense randori while the helper did six or eight minutes all night. It is a long way from a Russian national team stacked with world champions, which is part of what makes Travis's story, Pedro says, that much more amazing.

Specialization versus variety gets the same both-and answer. Travis's main throw is ippon seoi nage, Kayla's is o goshi, Pedro's was tai otoshi. From the grip of that main throw you build an arsenal in every direction so the opponent is always guessing — seoi, koshi guruma, seoi into osoto. With a few exceptions, such as Ono's uchi mata, the world figures out a one-trick pony. Fridman worries elite athletes start taking the main thing for granted. Pedro agrees the main throw never leaves daily training: crash pad, moving throws, explosive reps. You still have to evolve. Koga's dynamic seoi nage was unstoppable for years until people went unorthodox, came down his back, and took the lapel away. He added sode, osoto, tomoe nage. Once he got *that* grip, they still could not stop the seoi. The split-hip version Pedro's father taught him is harder than the basic form, but on entry both of the opponent's feet leave the mat at once. You have them. You just have to lock, turn, and slam.

For recreational adults who want to get good at judo without living on the competition circuit, Pedro thinks America has the emphasis backward. Everybody gets pushed toward tournaments. There is a huge audience that would love to become proficient and have skills they could actually use, and that athlete does not need randori. Picking people up and moving them around the mat is already a full-body workout. If you learn movement, feel, and timing, he thinks you will be a better athlete than the person who only does ugly, forceful randori. His school runs a recreational class with no randori in it. Students may stay fifteen or thirty minutes afterward. Most do not, because they are already dripping sweat.

If the goal is to compete, the next layer is a gripping system: dominate the grips, control the movement, force reactions, then attack. Jump in with higher-level players and the first complaint is that you cannot attack. You do not know where to put your hands, how to hold the gi, or that you have an inferior grip. Fridman knows the feeling from his own competition days. Against good black belts it did not even feel like losing. It felt like he had not shown up to play. Coaches say "just take a grip." Sometimes taking a grip puts you in a worse position than having none, because the opponent can throw you and you cannot throw them. You do not have to out-grip someone every second. You do have to put grips and throws together, or you are not in the match.

Back on the path from beginner to Olympic medal, visualization comes at the highest level. In the teen years, experience is the scarce resource. Americans have to go to Europe to feel that physical, unorthodox gripping; if you cannot deal with it you get thrown before you try your own attacks. They also have to go to Japan for the free-flowing technical judo. Pedro's father told him he had taken him as far as he could and sent him to England, to Neil Adams — Olympic silver medalist, world champion, a serious ground game, a hard grip, and the same main throw, tai otoshi. Pedro went eight to ten times, living at Adams's club in Coventry from about age sixteen.

The Coventry day started at seven: mountains, a five-mile run, park sprints, buddy carries. At nine, an hour and a half of sequential drilling with Adams, no randori — two or three attacks to set up the main one, the same on the ground. Afternoon weights. Evening randori at the club or a one-hour drive to another dojo with fifty bodies, a different place each night, three weeks straight. Adams taught him the juji gatame he still uses. As a commentator Adams became the voice of judo, charismatic and loud in the way Fridman compares to Joe Rogan. As a coach he tried Wales and other stints and did not produce an Olympic champion. He could teach technique; running a program of athletes who did not share his intensity was harder. Pedro bonded with him because he was all in. Whatever Adams said, he did.

Before they return to coaching, Fridman goes on a political tangent that clearly still stings. He loves Neil Adams's voice and he loves watching judo, and he cannot easily watch Olympic replays. He uploaded his Travis Stevens episode, including about a minute of overlay of the 2012 Ole Bischof match as they stepped through it, and YouTube took down the entire four-hour conversation. The IOC had the video uploaded and set to private. They are not asking for money. They are simply not showing it — not on their own service, not on NBC Olympics, nowhere.

Riner's Tokyo loss is not available. Full Usain Bolt races are not all online. The men's 100 meters in Tokyo, the Italian winning, is highlight-only as far as Fridman could find. Highlights are the opposite of what he wants. He wants the walk out, the coach's face, the ten minutes of a life building to a routine, not a two-minute clip of the last second. The Olympic Charter talks about the fullest coverage and the widest possible audience. As a fan he does not feel he is getting any of that. Pedro's word for what is being lost is history — all the magical moments of a sport, locked away. He calls it a sin.

After he retired, Pedro made a film called *Fury on the Mat* with a videographer friend, using old footage and Olympic material. Someone told him he could not use the Olympic footage. He said it was not television footage; it was his buddy's camera, his film. They told him that if it has Olympics in it, the U.S. Olympic Committee owns it. He sent it for review and got a bill: about thirty thousand dollars for a few spliced minutes. He negotiated down to about fifteen thousand, still paying for a few minutes in a film about his own life. His line: you would not even have that film if I had not competed in it.

He blames television rights — billions paid by NBC and carriers around the world dictating what can be replayed. Fridman thinks it is not only greed but incompetence at greed. Live rights are one market. Replay is another, and old YouTube clips still pull hundreds of millions of views a decade later. Pedro says streaming is outside the IOC's traditional comfort zone. Athletes cannot even buy their own matches for commercial use. The two of them land in the same place: the stories of the Games should belong, at least in part, to the people who lived them.

Fridman turns to Pedro the athlete. Four Olympics, bronze in two of them: what was the toughest match, the moment that defined him? Pedro names the bronze-medal match in Atlanta in 1996. Up to that point the United States team had not won a medal and had not even fought for one. It was home turf, his second Games. In Barcelona in 1992 he had won two matches and lost in the third round to a Japanese opponent, missing the podium even though the gold, silver, and bronze medalists were all men he had beaten — two of them, the Brazilian and the Cuban, he had never lost to. That is when he knew a podium was possible. In 96 he was twenty-five, in his prime, six months in Japan behind him. He lost to a Mongolian just before a match he had been anticipating against Japan, a letdown. Then came the bronze fight.

The stands held his family, his friends, everyone who had ever helped him in the sport, his Brown University wrestling teammates, uncles, aunts. It was, he says, Jimmy Pedro day. He gets goosebumps telling it. The opponent was the Brazilian he had beaten two or three times. Pedro came in on tai otoshi; the Brazilian was waiting and countered for a yuko. In the last minute Pedro tucked in his gi, gathered his thoughts, and the whole crowd started chanting USA. Energy poured in. He grabbed the man, came in on tai otoshi again, the Brazilian stepped off, and Pedro threw him with uchi mata for ippon. First Olympic medal, hometown crowd, the only medal the U.S. judo team would win at those Games. After that he was sold. He had to go back. He wanted a gold. He wanted that feeling again, even if he had to wait four years.

Fridman asks the question underneath those moments: does he love winning or hate losing more? Pedro's belief is that to be a champion you have to hate losing more than you like winning. He still lived for the wins. What excited him most was the finals, the spotlight. He cannot think of many times when the lights were on and he did not win. He might have lost early and missed the medal rounds as a younger man. His career is full of golds and bronzes, and he has very few silvers and fifths. Either he was out before the medals, or the spotlight came and he shone. He did not feel pressure in a final. It was just him against the other guy, and he loved that moment.

Pedro's father, Jimmy Pedro Sr., coached him and later coached Ronda Rousey and Kayla Harrison. The first thing about him: he is the most brutally honest person you will ever meet. If you are fat he will tell you that you are fat, to your face, because he wants you healthy. If you competed poorly he will not sugarcoat it. He is the ultimate litmus test. Second, he is a passionate student of the game who helped define Pedro's strategy and always looked for what was next. Third, he is, in Pedro's view, probably the most brilliant person in the country at preparing an athlete physically so that when the chips are down they are ready that day. Kayla has talked about how difficult her preparation was. That was him. He moved Ronda to New Hampshire, ran her in the morning, lifted in the basement, brought in a Russian girl, and had Ronda throw her a hundred times on a little crash pad on the cement, then drove to the Wakefield training center every night for three weeks before Beijing.

The gap in the older Pedro's coaching is mental. He was not an Olympic or world champion himself, and Pedro thinks he lacked the confidence to make other people feel invincible. He is a this-is-what-you-need-to-work-on coach, not a builder of King Kong belief. That is the piece the son added: visualization, the sense that you have earned the right to victory, a mantra that nobody is beating you today. Combined they made an unusual team — the father on physical preparation, identification of technical holes, and game plans; the son more technical, and the one who could put the athlete on the mat feeling unbeatable.

Mental preparation starts as a seed, not a speech the week of the Games. If someone has won a national title or proven themselves internationally, the first step is defining the goal: make the Olympic team. Pedro makes them put it on paper and commit. Walk before you run. National champion, then world team, then world medal, then the Olympics. When Kayla arrived in 2005 she did not say she wanted to be Olympic champion. They wanted national champion, then the world team, then a world medal, then they set sights on Olympic gold. The goals should stretch. They cannot be a pipe dream. Once it is on paper and feels achievable, you map the plan.

Then you visualize, every night before bed, or before training, or after, or first thing in the morning. Close your eyes and picture the day in its entirety: the scale, breakfast, a few jokes, packing the judo bag, the bus, walking into the stadium, the draw sheet, the warm-up, walking out of the chute, the first throw, the high-five with the coach, all the way to raising your arms, hugging the opponent, running with the flag, hearing "Olympic champion, Jimmy Pedro," the medal around the neck, the photos. Do it enough and pathways get created. When the body arrives, it has been there before. Travis's addition: do not watch yourself from third person. Feel the warm cup, the gi in the hands, sweat on the forehead, tape on the fingers, the smell of the hall. When Pedro describes it, he gets goosebumps and his armpits sweat, because the mental reps and the real ones have fused. He used the same method on his company and his dojo. He told his wife he wanted his own business, his own decisions, a number that sounded huge at the time. It did not happen in five years. It happened. He was on the path.

For a long time Pedro's school sat between forty and sixty students. He could not understand why more people would not walk in, so he hired consultants. They told him the place was intimidating. Off the street, the first thing you see is a giant Olympic champion on the wall and people flying through the air and landing hard, and you are supposed to believe that is the class for a white belt. Classes ran an hour and a half to two hours, which nobody can handle on day one. He listened. He restructured the curriculum: four-to-six, six-to-thirteen, beginner classes that do not mix with advanced people. He had to make the school accessible instead of a club only for people who wanted to train hard.

Then came the next objection: if you have a lot of recreational people, you cannot produce champions in the same building. Pedro gathered his black belts in 2006 and told them the vision. He wanted a club of more than two hundred judo-only athletes — no jiu-jitsu, no karate — and inside that dojo he wanted Olympic champions *and* five-year-olds *and* people in their seventies. The only way was to split the instructors: who coaches recreational, who coaches competitive, programs fully separated. By 2012 they had Olympic champion Kayla Harrison, more than two hundred people, and a thriving business. It did not exist in the country at that price point, about $150 a month, judo only. He built it in his head first.

Fridman talks about keeping certain dreams away from people who would laugh them out, even people who love you. Pedro's version of the same idea is simpler. A lot of people overestimate others and sell themselves short. Everybody started as an infant who could not walk or talk. He tells athletes and recreational students the same line: nobody is better than you are, nobody, unless you allow them to be. Map the plan, believe, go all out, and expect to fail a lot. Social media is the distortion. Nobody posts the picture of themselves on the ground in failure, the broken arm, the rehab, the couch. You see them after they have climbed back to the pinnacle, with the medal. The first engine has to come from you. Other people can define the path, offer resources, make introductions, encourage. The sacrifices are yours, so the decision cannot be your parents' or your spouse's.

What makes Travis Stevens great? Fight. Pedro first really saw him in 2005 in Italy, on a U23 Elite trip, twenty kids hand-picked for a hard European event, the first time Pedro had coached an international team. Travis was seventeen or eighteen, 81 kilograms. He won three and lost two. What stood out was the scrapping. He wanted to win more than any of them, and after the second loss he was genuinely disappointed, as if he were *supposed* to beat grown men with much higher judo. Pedro told him he had a long career and called Jason Morris: that kid has some fight in him. There is no such thing as hard work to Travis. If you tell him to put his head through the wall and that is how he wins, he will do it. He hates failure more than he likes winning. He punishes himself after a loss. Every close athlete Pedro has worked with had that trait. They would rather get hit by a car than lose a judo tournament.

Injuries, in Travis's mind, are not a hero story. They are the job. He told Fridman he does not regret pushing his body; he thinks he is less injury-prone now because everything has already broken and grown back stronger. At that 2005 camp Pedro told the group he was sick of America being a first-round warm-up. If you get injured you are not sitting on the side with an ice bag, skipping rounds, then telling him you are fine tomorrow. If you can train tomorrow, you can train today. The only way you leave the dojo is if the ambulance takes you out. Pedro thinks Travis bought that message subliminally and lived it. In Europe Pedro would tell him to tape it and take the rest of the day. Travis would say no, sensei, the ambulance is not taking me, it is just a wrist, just an ankle.

Weight cutting breaks some of the toughest people Pedro has known. It did not break Travis. Suffering was part of getting ready for battle: if I suffered this much, my opponents will pay. Making weight was never optional. He often would not touch a scale until he arrived, sometimes nine kilograms over on the plane, still five over the day before, three workouts a day, a Mountain Dew or a chocolate bar as a reward, back up to 87 in the morning, on weight for about five minutes on the morning of. Then the European circuit: fight in Paris, a week of double sessions, fight the next weekend, another camp, fight the third weekend. Japan flies home after Paris. Germany skips France to peak for Germany. The Americans arrive not at a hundred percent, which is the point. By the Worlds or the Olympics the monsters from Germany feel like nothing, because now the Americans are actually rested.

London 2012 felt, to Pedro, like somebody had died. In the Ole Bischof semifinal Travis left everything on the mat — ten minutes of fighting in a twenty-something-minute match — then cried for forty-five minutes. Pedro could not regroup him for the bronze. It was gold or nothing. He lost to a Canadian he had beaten every other time, the fire already spent. The next day his training partner Kayla won America's first women's judo gold; his childhood friend Marti Malloy had bronze. He had fifth. For four years every reporter wanted Kayla, and every kid asked where his medal was. In Rio he was the strongest Travis Pedro had ever felt on the mat. The morning of, Pedro looked him in the eye: are you ready? Travis said he was going to shock the world. In the hall, other athletes sweated through nervous uchi komi. Travis had big headphones, a USA tank, glow-in-the-dark swim trunks, dancing around like a kid whose dad had just said go play — a tiger coming out of a cage. In the semis he choked out Avtandili Tchrikishvili, world number one, world champion, Georgian flag bearer, a man who had smashed him in the first minute before. Almost nobody in the stadium expected it. Kayla already had her second gold. Travis's silver, Pedro says, was icing on the best performance in American judo history.

Kayla Harrison is, in Pedro's phrasing, one of the greatest American judoka ever: two Olympic golds, 2010 world champion. What made her? Mental toughness, first. He does not say forget the sexual abuse she went through as a young person, but she had to compartmentalize it. She had zero self-esteem, zero self-worth, and did not even want to be on this earth. Getting her the right help, surrounding her with people who could walk with her, and reaffirming that she had made the right decision and should have zero guilt — that took a team, and his father was a huge part of it. The line he keeps repeating: it happened to her, it does not define her. What defines her is what she does from now on.

As an athlete she is a warrior like Travis. Pedro Sr. joked that she is a workhorse, not a thoroughbred, so they were not going to treat her like one. She arrived at fifteen. They put her with a serious strength coach, Olympic-style lifting, as her body was still developing. Pedro was still young enough and close enough in weight to train with her; so was Travis; the top U.S. men were in the building. Night after night she got the highest rounds a girl in that country could get. She had been competing at 63 kilograms, 138 pounds, and struggling. Ronda Rousey was in the same school at 70. Moving up one class meant Ronda's division. Pedro's father told her to skip it and go to 78, 172 pounds. She was already 150. Put twenty pounds on. The call was also about technique. People who cut too hard for too long think only about weight, train tired, and stop improving. At 78 she could get bigger, stronger, and learn to dominate a class she would grow into. They assumed Ronda would stay through 2012. Kayla passed her and made the national team in the class above.

The story he likes telling, because nobody sees the bad days, is January 2010. He sent her to the Starrett Cup in Brooklyn, a local tournament where two Canadian women ranked around 15th to 20th in the world would be waiting — not superstars, tough. Three women in the division. She lost both fights. She was already a junior world champion; this was the senior level, and two non-medalists had just beaten her. Ten months later, at the 2010 World Championships in Tokyo, in judo's motherland, she became world champion. That turnaround is only possible, Pedro says, if you put the losses in their proper context and do not let them destroy you. The team's mentality was that no tournament is beneath them. Fridman, it turns out, was at that same Starrett Cup as a beginner — and in the black-belt division — one of those little roads that reconnect.

The other story is the 2015 Tokyo Grand Slam, last hard tournament before Rio. Kayla had beaten almost everyone in the division; there was a Japanese opponent she had lost to last time, and they wanted that win in her pocket. She showed up with a stinger in her neck, told the trainer, walked around holding her neck, and did not tell the Pedros. The trainer said he did not think she should fight. Pedro asked whether this was pain or injury risk. Pinched nerve, pain, no long-term risk, and a shot would take the pain away. Then do that. Kayla came over stunned: the trainer said I cannot fight. They had already talked. You are not injured, you are in pain because we just came from camp, and we came here to beat this girl. She understood, took the shot, fought, beat the Japanese woman, and won the gold. The rest of the world thought they were crazy. The point was not only the medal. It was knowing she could beat those women when she was not at a hundred percent. Going into the Olympics, not a woman in the division thought she could beat Kayla.

Kayla went through depression after her second Olympic gold. Pedro's explanation is painfully concrete. There is a lack of purpose. Every morning you knew what the day was for. Then you win, you get the fame, and you wake up and ask: now what? In Japan or France an Olympic champion might be handed a path — IJF ambassador, a salary, teaching children, flying as a face of women's sport. For Kayla there was nothing. In an interview at the Games, Pedro said she would not compete at the next Olympics. A third gold would not motivate her. MMA? No. She should be able to make a living off what she had already accomplished.

Retirement, in American judo, turns the money off. The USA Judo salary disappeared — about $72,000 a year. The Olympic committee stipend disappeared. The New York Athletic Club had sponsored her since she was fifteen, after Pedro told them that if they invested now she would pay them back; the day she won gold he called to say I told you so. Once she stopped representing them, that went too. There were no television commercials waiting. Judo is an obscure sport in the United States. The gold-medal bonus is about $25,000. You cannot live on that. No purpose, no direction, no revenue. That is a recipe for getting lost, even after you have done the thing you set out to do. Life, he says, has a way of helping a great champion find a way. She later went into mixed martial arts, and she adopted her sister's children as their legal guardian. Raising those kids is her purpose now.

Fridman tries to start some trouble: Kayla has said she could beat Khabib Nurmagomedov in judo. Pedro is careful. He does not know Khabib's judo rank, and he knows the Russian system respects judo immensely. He did train with Kayla. He is an Olympic medalist and a world champion, older by then, and as a man he had to go a hundred percent or she would smash him. In a pure judo match — no grabbing legs, you have to grip up and throw — if Khabib does not understand high-level gripping, Pedro would put his money on Kayla. Not MMA, not wrestling, not a submission contest. If Khabib could place at Russian nationals, he would beat her. He has seen her smash some of America's best juniors, men who medaled at senior nationals. She is not going to do that to Travis, or to a senior national champion or Olympian. Other male black belts she will go toe to toe with.

On Vladimir Putin, Pedro has actually seen him on the mat. He is close with the Russian federation; Ezio Gamba, the Italian architect of Russia's 2012 and 2016 Olympic teams, is a friend. The 2012 Olympic team lived at Pedro's studio in Boston for a month, three Olympic champions among them, an experience-America program. He has watched them in Russia at the national training center, taking falls and doing judo with Putin. At sixty-two or sixty-five, Putin moves really well for someone who probably has not done much judo in years, which tells Pedro he was a real player at some point. Fridman has been surprised how many powerful people carry judo as a formative memory — confidence, artistry, the formality of honoring a tradition. Pedro sees it in his own school: four generations, someone who did judo with his father, a child who trained with him, that child's child, and now a toddler in the program. The people who stay, he says, become who they are in the fabric of it.

How does a person in the United States actually start judo when there are thousands of jiu-jitsu schools and the nearest dojo might be two or three hours away? If you are lucky enough to live near one, go there. Pedro and Travis also built the American Judo System at usajudo.com, breaking every technique down to mechanics: feet only, then hands and feet, then all directions, then a partner, uchi komi, moving, static throws, live throws, from foundation to advanced. They have twelve to fifteen standing techniques plus groundwork, live Q&A every couple of weeks, and a longer dream of a standing curriculum for jiu-jitsu instructors who want a judo black belt, with video promotions. Most existing judo dojos, he says, still cater to competitors, or to hobbyists teaching three nights a week, one junior class and one senior class, one size fits all, falls for six months even if you already know how to fall from jiu-jitsu. If you do not meet the customer's expectation, you will not have many customers.

Compared with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo is a hard sport for adults. Other than judo, when did Pedro last do a forward somersault? Grade school. Most people spend eight to ten hours a day at a computer or on a couch and have not been athletic since high school. A thirty-five or forty-year-old walking into a one-size-fits-all dojo will struggle. For those people jiu-jitsu makes a lot of sense: self-defense, cerebral, smaller people can use technique, safer, and the UFC has given it an identity you can talk about on Monday. The culture feels like family. That is why it is growing. Judo, he thinks, is a better sport for children — more three-dimensional, more interactive, easier to teach throwing safely, bodies that recover. Judo can thrive from kids through high school and college; jiu-jitsu thrives from eighteen up. A judo school that wants to live has to have a recreational adult fundamentals program where people learn the moves and are not shoved into randori they cannot control.

Advice for young people comes out of his own detour. He did not know as a kid that he would own companies that make their living from martial arts; that opportunity did not exist, so he created it. For a while he was stuck. He worked internet marketing at Monster.com from eight to five, then judo from six to nine, a whole day tied up in something he was not passionate about. His wife, Marie, told him that if he could figure out how to make a living exclusively from martial arts — brain, heart, and passion pointed at one thing — he would be successful. He left the job. He had three kids. Find something you love so it does not feel like work. If the way to get paid for it does not exist, be resourceful and do not let anybody tell you that you cannot. He did not know a 200-person, judo-only school charging jiu-jitsu prices could exist in this country. He built one.

You will fail and have dark days. Persevere, believe, have a plan, and be willing to bring people in to tell you what you are doing wrong — which is what the consultants were. Help others. If someone wants a dojo off the ground or an event series running, he tries to make their dream work, because they will remember it forever and become family and the best advocates you will ever have. He did it with kids at the school, with customers building dojos, with Brian Simmons at Grapplers Quest and a full set of mats, with the Gracies. If he says he will do it, he does it. Fridman closes with a personal ledger. Years earlier, before MIT, Pedro did not know who he was and still welcomed him into the dojo, sat for a conversation, and told him he had done a good job — a sentence almost nobody was saying to him then. Pedro says it was genuine. Beat reporters around the Olympics mispronounced his name, got the background wrong, or called five minutes beforehand to say they would be ninety minutes late. Fridman showed up with notes and the whole history and asked questions that had been thought through. Kindness, in this telling, is not a strategy. It is just how the people who last in this sport tend to behave. Then they go train.