Jessica Klimkait overcomes disappointing loss to win bronze in judo at Tokyo Olympics for Canada

Opinion

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This article was published 26/07/2021 (1527 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO—One thing they don’t always tell you about Olympic combat sports is how many people cry. They lie on their backs and stare at the ceiling, or they bend at the waist in a bow and it does not stop until their hands are on their knees. They collapse into a coach’s arms, bury their face in their hands, weep. It can be so immediate, and it’s not just the losers, either. But that is where the pain is.

Whitby’s Jessica Klimkait came into the Olympic women’s 57-kilogram judo event a world champion, which she won in June in Budapest. She hoped for gold. And suddenly she was in a war in the semifinal with Sarah Léonie Cysique of France, a defensive fighter, strong. Cysique was pushing her; she felt it slipping away. She turned the match as they both balanced on the edge; Klimkait reached for one more attack, just one. A penalty either way would decide it. She was rolling. She just needed one.

And the 24-year-old Klimkait reached to grab Cysique’s uniform and missed, and she fell, and seconds later she had lost the match and was looking at something far away. But unlike so many of the other athletes here, she didn’t cry.

“I was just sort of, like, blank space for me in my mind,” said Klimkait, who recovered to win bronze for the first medal in women’s judo in Canadian history. “The realization didn’t catch up to me; I still was in the fight, until I guess I stepped down those stairs.”

And then came the hard part. In judo you lose the semi and have maybe an hour before you fight for bronze, in a sport where athletes are so often in tears before they leave the mat. It happened to the 27-year-old Arthur Margelidon of Montreal, too: he fought his way to a bronze medal match and lost to Mongolia’s Tsogtbaatar Tsend-Ochir. Two judo medals in a day would have been historic for Canada, but Margelidon knew the match was over when his arm, barred by Tsend-Ochir, was about to break. The end smashed him.

“You build all this emotion to push you towards the win,” Margelidon said, his eyes red and hollowed. “And once you lose, it’s just like all that emotion escapes.”

So for Klimkait all of this was harder than it looked. She and Cysique were 3:10 into extra time after an exhausting four-minute match; you could see they were tired. Each had two penalties, when a third would lose the match.

Klimkait had spent the last three years trying to beat fellow Canadian Christa Deguchi, who had changed affiliation from Japan to Canada; Klimkait was far from sure she could ever beat her in a sport where you send one athlete. Going into the worlds Deguchi and Klimkait were ranked as the two best judokas in the world. But Deguchi, who was No. 1, lost in the semi. Klimkait won.

So she found herself here, in the home of judo, in the Nippon Budokan, which was built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It’s based on 1,300-year-old temples, nestled in the park around the Imperial Palace. And without the roar of a Japanese crowd, the matches somehow shrunk to something even more primal: two people on a mat. In a way judo is as old as grappling itself, if grappling defined by highly specific rules. In person, it is not everyone’s idea of a spectator sport: if you don’t know the intricacies, and most don’t, it has echoes of a ferocious bouncer trying to drag a determined patron out of a bar.

But it is a zero-sum dance where even minor violations of judo’s rules add up, and can cost you. It all produces a ferocious, desperate, calculated form of combat, requiring every bit of yourself that you can give. And when it ends you’re either the winner or you have been viscerally, personally, technically and primally bested.

Maybe that’s why so many of them cry.

“Often those people, they’ll lose the semi, and they’re mentally broken,” said Sasha Mehmedovic, an assistant coach for Canada’s national team.

But Klimkait — and Japan’s Tsukasa Yoshida, who had lost to eventual gold medallist Nora Gjakova of Kosovo in the other semi, on home soil, and recovered to win the second bronze in the event — refused. Klimkait tried to think about the other athletes she had seen make that transition here; she thought about how so many of them still had just as much pride walking away with bronze.

“I still wanted to feel that pride,” she said.

She dominated Slovenia’s Kaja Kajzer for bronze. And then — in the few moments between walking off but before talking to the media, she cried. A couple times, she said.

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“Yeah,” she said, with a sad attempt at a smile, “it hits you like a wall.”

“Honestly, the last two or three years kind of felt like I was in like a pressure cooker,” said Klimkait. “I was dealing with a lot of pressure from myself. My family doesn’t put pressure on me, but I want to make them proud, as well as my coaches, and my training partners who work so hard with me every single day. I really wanted to come to the Olympics and do the best that I could for them.

“So right now, I’m going to be emotional about missing that gold medal, but I think looking back I’m going to be proud of myself because I know that the last year, three years, physically, mentally and physically have been extremely hard. I honestly don’t even know how I kind of pulled myself through it. So I think I’ll just be proud of myself.”

Down from where she spoke, the 23-year-old Cysique spoke, and she cried as she did. Down from her, Yoshida tried to hold herself together. When you lose a fight, when you lose something you love, it hurts. You just have to get up off the mat.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur