Sydney Games: Countdown To 2000 Summer Olympics Ready For Prime Time But Judo Champ Pedro Sees His Sport Eclipsed
Please forgive Jimmy Pedro if he sounds just a little annoyed at the major to-do about the U.S. Olympic basketball “Dream Team.”
He has his own dream, thank you.
For more than a decade, Pedro has been one of the best Americans in a sport that may not even wind up on the 100-plus hours of “minor” television coverage of the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.
He is the current world champion. He has won national titles five times and has been ranked No. 1 in the country for 10 years. He has a bronze medal from the 1996 Games in Atlanta and has been called the Americans’ best hope for gold in his sport this year.
But the best of judo - and Pedro is among the best - isn’t going to toss the Dream Team out of the spotlight.
“Here’s a guy making $10 million a year, and how could he possibly get more exposure? And then he goes to the Olympics and he gets all the coverage and takes away from the other sports,” said Pedro, of Lawrence, Mass.
He has labored for years in the obscurity - and poverty - of a sport that has barely 30,000 participants in the United States, no organized Olympic development program and precious few resources.
And he has been the best for years. With his father as his coach, Pedro, now 30, started judo when he was 5 years old and did not lose a match until he was 11. In addition to his championships, he also is the only American to win major championships in the sport’s two biggest hotbeds, France and Japan.
He considered retiring after the bronze medal in 1996. But after a three-month layoff and a long talk with his wife, he went back into training.
“If I hadn’t been doing well going into Atlanta and then come away with a bronze, I would have quit,” he said. “But I felt like I was just getting to my peak.”
In fact, his biggest triumphs have come since then, including his 1999 world championship - the first for an American in 12 years - and the victories at the Paris Open and Shoriki Open.
But even if he claims a gold medal in Sydney - the first judo gold for the United States - there won’t be any profiles on NBC, no parades, no $10million-a-year job to pick up. In fact, there’s no job at all.
“The hard part with judo is that there’s no place to go and do what I love to do after I’m done,” he said. “I have to go and get a job. All the coaches with U.S. Judo are volunteers.”
He is teaching the sport to youngsters, but it’s not a full-time job, not with so few participants. Perhaps the only full-time job in the country is executive director of U.S. Judo, a position the Brown University grad said he would like to try.
“I have a lot of good ideas, and I’ve been exposed to world judo,” he said.