r/judo • u/MasterofLinking shodan • Dec 17 '24

Competing and Tournaments Kouchi while grabbing your own leg.

At a recent local tournament we had this situation, that was a little bit of a controversy. While Tori is not grabbing Ukes leg, in my opinion preventing the possibility of stepping back and thus defending the throw would still fall under blocking the leg. What's your opinion? Would you have given the score or shido?

>! decision was score !<

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '24

He touches the opponents leg with his arm. I remember similar situation happened with Rafaela Silva during Olympic games (I dont remember which was it probably 2020) and I think she got shido’ed.

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u/EchoingUnion Dec 18 '24 edited Dec 18 '24

Rafaela Silva scored with that, she didn't get a shido. It was correct reffing. What she did in that match was completely legal, it's different from what happens in OP's video.

Rafaela grabbed the opponent's sleeve with her right hand, and used her right elbow to block her opponent's leg while driving forward, all the while still maintaining her grip on the sleeve with that same arm. That sort of action has always been legal.

In fact, current -73kg olympic and world champion Heydarov has always used this sort of leg blocking action with his arm/elbow for his kata guruma his whole career. As long as the hand is still maintaining a grip on uke's gi, that corresponding arm/elbow blocking uke's leg is perfectly legal.

Gaba's kata guruma that he used to beat Abe Hifumi at the Paris mixed team finals also used this sort of leg block. It's always been legal, as long as tori maintains the grip on uke's upper body. Of course if tori loses the grip and touches uke's pants that's a shido.

On the other hand, what OP's video shows is tori grabbing himself while hooking around uke's leg. There is zero doubt that what tori in OP's' video did is illegal, there's no controversy around that despite what MarsupialFormer claims.

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u/rtsuya Nidan | Hollywood Judo | Tatami Talk Podcast Dec 18 '24

What she did in that match was completely legal, it's different from what happens in OP's video.

to put some context into this... the SOR from 2015 version to 2017 did not specifically say that it was legal to do this. It wasn't until the 2020 version of the SOR did they added images and pictures explicitly saying its legal.

Though the IJF released a statement on facebook saying it was in the referee rulebook they released in 2014 and talked about in refereeing seminars (not posted on youtube). They just relied on information to trickle down to the NGBs and from NGBs to each dojo. A system that they still seem to insist on following right now which has shown to be a terrible way to do things. At the very least they are posting these things up for the first time on JudoTV so anyone can access them now.

So it's not on the official rule book... but it was on some other rule book they released years ago... IJF has always been really bad about printing rules and keeping them up to date and it has only recently improved. If you just go by the official SOR I think most people will be interpret this throw as illegal... including one fo the referees at Rio olympics I talked to.