Shohei Ono, who has been undefeated in his individual weight class in international judo competitions for more than eight years, has announced that he will give up his pursuit of a third consecutive Olympic gold.
A two-time Olympic judo champion and three World Cup gold medalists Shohei Ono30, is has announced that he is leaving the competition (you will switch to another service). Consequently, the Japanese, who dominated the 73-kilogram men’s series for years, will no longer be seen at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Ono is said to be applying to the training program for coaches organized by the Japanese Olympic Committee, which is being studied in Great Britain. The judo great follows his former coach Kosei Inoue footprints and a former judo star currently living in the British Isles Masashi Ebinumaa.
Three-time world champion Ono has not competed in his weight class since his Olympic victory in Tokyo. Ono made his breakthrough in 2013 at his first World Championships, where he immediately won the championship with ippon wins.
Ono has been undefeated in international competitions in his individual weight class since August 2014, if you don’t count the couple of matches he has had to give up either due to injury or illness.
Ono has been called “the world’s strongest judoka”. The tough-minded and skilled superstar of his sport has been generally considered the best judoka in the world for years.
Many outsiders of the sport cannot even fathom what kind of brilliant career winning two Olympic golds and three world championships requires from a Japanese judoka. It’s an unimaginably hard trick, because the Japanese national judo championships, especially in the men’s 73 kg category represented by Ono, are higher-class events than the Olympics, the World Championships and all other international competitions.
At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Ono won gold with an overwhelming performance. He was even more dominant when he returned to action after a gap year, winning the 2019 world championship at the iconic Tokyo Budokan, among other things.
In the Olympic finals in Tokyo, Ono defeated the Georgian in an epic match that went into overtime Lasha Shavdatuashvili. At the time, Ono admitted afterwards that his calm fighting style hid the fact that he was fighting for the first time in his career with a “sense of fear” that he had never felt before.
A source close to Ono has revealed that despite his unparalleled judo skills on the tatami, the superstar has had ups and downs with motivation and expectations. The years-long and drastic weight loss has also consumed mental resources.