Every Champion Wants to Quit: Jimmy Pedro on Judo, Fathers, Injury and the Fight to Keep the Sport Alive in America

The conversation opens with a hypothetical from the host: with $1 million on the line, would Pedro rather face a top-ten Russian or Japanese 73 kg player? He picks the Russian, because his own record against Russians was better than against Japanese opponents, who he considers more technical. The host introduces him as a four-time Olympian (1992, 1996, 2000, 2004), two-time Olympic bronze medalist, and 1999 world champion who has coached stars such as Kayla Harrison, Ronda Rousey and Travis Stevens.

His first coach, and in his words always his coach, was his father. Judo was mandatory growing up: there was no option of skipping practice, and his father added conditioning and circuit training on top. Pedro says his father was demanding because he believed judo would build life lessons and character, the way other parents insist on vegetables.

As a father himself, Pedro says he is different. His own father never made the Olympics, so Pedro felt he was competing with and for him, while his kids feel they compete for him and carry the pressure of being Jimmy Pedro's children. He lets them choose their sports: one son is a top-ranked wrestler, and a daughter played hockey and softball.

Pedro admits that if he had been given the choice, he probably would never have excelled at judo. Until about 15 he felt immature and sometimes despised training. Then he started winning, traveling to camps and overseas, and meeting other athletes, and at that point he began doing it for himself.

Once Pedro was motivated, he started seeing his father as a great coach, and the biggest credit he gives him is that he sent his son away. Most coaches, Pedro says, make the mistake of holding students back because they fear the athlete will learn something special elsewhere and stop crediting them. His father said he had taken him as far as he could technically and wanted to surround him with greatness.

The point, according to his father, was to see that champions are ordinary people who make mistakes, fall down and get back up. Pedro trained with top American coaches, in England, Japan and Germany, and had a rule: don't just train, bring back a new technique from everywhere you go. To this day, he says, he can name where he learned each technique of his career.

Pedro recalls two times he wanted to quit. At 16, in the US Open, he fought grown men, battled back to a bronze-medal match, scored quickly against a strong 24-year-old Korean, then was manhandled and lost on penalties. His father screamed at him, saying he had fought afraid, and Pedro lay crying in the Colorado Springs snow feeling like a failure.

At 19, after six weeks in Japan and cutting a lot of weight, he went 0-2 at the Kano Cup, losing to Russian Sergey Kosmynin and then to Japan's Nakamura. He remembers sitting on the steps of the Budokan thinking he hated the sport. His takeaway is that people only see champions as winners, not the dark days, and that what makes a champion is whether they suck it up, learn from the loss and dig deeper. He later beat Kosmynin in Italy in 1992.

Pedro says he played many sports as a kid and does not regret his early years, apart from wishing he had enjoyed them more. He was undefeated in judo until 11, and the pressure of protecting that streak gave him anxiety before every tournament. Looking back, he says individual sports teach that you decide how good you become.

A Brown graduate, he argues that athletes who pursue education, a career or family alongside sport become better athletes. If sport is all you have, failure feels complete and the lows end up lower. He says even small things help, like teaching students, and that seeing his toddlers run to him after a loss in Russia made that loss fade. He adds that six months before the Games it is time to focus fully.

Pedro attributes his longevity to a desire to be the best in the world, and he says an injury is part of that story. In a tournament final in Korea he was thrown on his head, stuck his head out instead of taking the fall, and landed on its top. On the flight home it became harder to lift his chin, and by the time he landed in Boston the swollen disc was pressing on his spinal cord.

The first MRI doctor told him he would never do sports again. Pedro remembers crying in the elevator at 23 and being unable to lie down, with his chin pinned to his chest, an arm numb and shrinking from nerve damage, and the pain excruciating. He spent about six months like that, often sleeping upright in a traction unit in his dorm room.

Over time, with anti-inflammatories and traction and no surgery, the nerve regenerated and the disc went back in. His doctor first allowed only weight-room work, and Pedro remembers a Nautilus machine with no weight and a barbell that shook in his hands. It took about nine months to be strong enough to return to the mat.

Pedro calls his younger self fearless, raw and gritty, but not very explosive because he cut so much weight, and says his best years were 1995 to 1999. He thinks he should have been world champion in 1995 after a split-decision semifinal loss, and he missed the 1997 Worlds because a teammate fell into his knee two weeks before. In the 1998-99 run he lost only a couple of times, even as constant tournaments wore down his body.

He retired after the 2000 Games, where as the reigning world champion he lost his first round to a top-five Korean, feeling the weight of America's hopes for a first-ever gold. Fifth place felt like total failure, and he could not accept leaving that way. In 2002 he told his wife Marie he wanted one more run, and he calls the two years to 2004 the most enjoyable of his life, reaching the final of every tournament.

Pedro says the 2004 version of himself was a weaker judoka than in the late 1990s but older, hungry, efficient and free of pressure. He sees the same lesson in Kayla Harrison, who cracked under the pressure of repeating as world champion in 2011. Finishing third made her an underdog going into London and hungry again, and Pedro says if she had won, she would not have won the Olympics in 2012.

On the post-Olympic letdown, he describes losing at his first Games despite having beaten all three podium finishers, and crying while thinking he had sacrificed everything. A medal brings a hero's welcome but then a flood of requests for your time. Nothing else, he says, matches the feeling of winning; a marathon and even business deals do not come close, except watching Kayla win, which he sees as a destiny that his Sydney loss helped set up.

Asked how he has produced nearly all recent US medalists, Pedro says the key is that there is a system, something he believes most of USA Judo lacks. In Boston he helped run an elite under-23 program for six years that took the country's 20 most talented kids, a group that included Marty Malloy, Travis Stevens, Kayla Harrison and Nick Delpopolo. The first requirement is a championship mindset and a willingness to work and take punishment.

The second is knowing how to train. His group believes in conditioning, grip fighting, ground work and strategy, because the Americans cannot beat Russians, French, Brazilians or Japanese by simply doing more judo than they do, as those countries have far more people to train with. He contrasts the Russian approach, heavy on drilling with little randori, with Japan's, where athletes might do 15 rounds of randori a day.

He also stresses periodization. Pedro tells the story of teaching his 16-year-old wrestling son that he cannot go at full intensity 365 days a year, because body and mind need time to heal or they become used to a plateau. To reach a level above that, athletes must come down so they can build up, much like boxers who relax between training camps.

Pedro says his father is a huge part of the system, running a technical session every morning for the elite athletes, since judo itself will never make Pedro rich and he works full-time. He credits martial arts for helping him become fairly wealthy, and he now has business ties to Fuji sports and mat companies. A typical elite week includes a morning technical session of an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes, judo-specific strength training in the afternoon, and a randori session at night.

Most weekdays involve at least three sessions, with some mornings given to weights only, a lighter Friday, and weekends largely off unless there is a tournament. The coach's own hardest challenge heading into 2016, he says, has been balancing family and team. After 2012 he took a break because the travel took a toll on his wife and kids, and he has leaned on his father to coach Harrison and Stevens in his absence.

The most painful moment as a coach, he says, was watching Travis Stevens lose his Olympic semifinal. Stevens trains four or five times a day and doesn't drink, and Pedro watched him cry on the sideline for an hour before the bronze match, having emptied himself emotionally. The transcript then jumps; in what follows Pedro talks about visualization, saying athletes who have mentally experienced a win many times, as Harrison did, can feel on autopilot when it happens.

Sports, Pedro says, are about 90% mental, because everyone does the physical work but not everyone does the mental work. He emphasizes strategy, video study and a clear plan for each opponent, and calls himself a more cerebral coach than he was an athlete, since he had to learn much of it alone. Given the dojo's limited money against Japan, Russia and France, he thinks the results show the approach works.

On the International Judo Federation's rule changes, Pedro says the goals were to differentiate judo from wrestling, in case the Olympics cut one of them, and to make it more fan-friendly by reducing time spent gripping. He thinks judo will never be a good live sport, and that it only works as a produced story with highlights and background on the athletes. He compares it to wrestling or soccer: you need a team or athlete to care about, and at big Grand Slam events he sees almost nobody in the stands.

He also dislikes the loss of leg grabs, arguing they are a self-defense element, and says judo has become basically an Olympic sport. In his view that makes it impractical for the masses, because it is too physical and dangerous, whereas jiu-jitsu succeeded by moving to a safer ground game that even an 80-year-old can practice. For Pedro, judo has become a sport only the young can do.

Looking 50 years ahead, he expects big programs in Japan, Brazil, France and Russia to keep growing because they invest in cadet, junior and senior pipelines. The United States invests nothing in its juniors, parents pay for cadets, and elite athletes are increasingly expensive to fund. He says there are fewer elite American players now than four or eight years ago, many South American countries are fading, and unless funding changes, the US might send two athletes to Tokyo in 2020, with one guaranteed.