Hi folks, my name is Euan Burton; I compete for Great Britain in the -81kg class for judo.

I know that judo will be a relatively alien sport for many of you so I hope that between now and Beijing I can give you a little bit of a taste of what it is like to be a judo athlete and help you to better understand my sport.

Well it’s early February and with Valentines Day approaching what better place to spend the weekend than in beautiful Paris?

There will be no romantic twilight walks along the seine or meals in the shadow of the Eiffel tower for the British Judo Team, however. We will spend the weekend in front of 20,000+ partisan French judo fans at the magnificent Bercy stadium at what the Parisians simply call “la Tournoi”.

It is the jewel in the crown of European judo events. Outside the “majors” (European, World and Olympic Games) Paris is the most prestigious of all the titles a judo player can win. The best of the best from Europe will be joined by the world judo powers from Japan, Korea, China and Brazil.

For the Europeans this year's event takes on extra significance with Olympic qualification points at stake. The pressure is building!

I leave Edinburgh airport on Friday morning with five of my team-mates from the Edinburgh Judo Club also competing for GB, and our coach Billy Cusack.

Judo is a weight category sport and the journey out to an event can often be a stressful one with many of us “cutting” weight for the competition. It’s probably why we look like such a miserable bunch on the way to events, especially as airports are usually full of people filling time by eating and drinking!

The competition will be over two days with the lightweights (men -60kg, -66kg, -73kg, women -48kg, -52kg, -57kg, -63kg) on Saturday and the heavyweights on Sunday (men -81kg, -90kg, -100kg and +100kg and women -70kg, -78kg and +78kg).

Arriving in Paris we are transferred to our hotel across the road from the venue and get our team meetings out of the way. We go over Weigh-In times, meal times, warm-up partners, medical issues and any other information that the players might need to know.

The rest of the evening I spend unpacking and relaxing while the players that fight on Saturday get their final preparations done.

I am always glad when I am fighting on the second day. It gives you a wee bit of time to get used to the event and see the lay of the land. I get to bed pretty early as I’m sharing with James Millar, who is our -60kg fighter, and he will be competing in the morning. I’ve said I’ll warm him up so I have to be at the venue with him at 8am in the morning.

I’m helping James by warming him up to fight but it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. It gets me up and moving early on Saturday, a rehearsal for the next day and also the warm-up lets me sweat off a little more weight so that I can get to the 81kg limit for my weight category.

It also helps me to stay loose and relaxed. After his warm-up, I head to the stands to watch the early parts of the competition. It may sound a bit cold but I have to try to distance myself from the emotion of the day today.

Of course I desperately want the guys to win but I purposely avoid getting wrapped up in their contests. I don’t shout, yell or scream at them which is difficult as these are my best friends for years, but it is important for me to save all the energy I can for my competition on Sunday.

It is a lesson I learned way back in 1999 when I was training partner for Graeme Randall at the World Championships. Graeme had a rollercoaster day, at times coming back from the brink, to win all his matches and become World Champion.

David Somerville, the GB -66kg player at those championships, had stayed to the bitter end to support Graeme and see his friend lift the title. But the next day David failed in his quest to win a World medal.

Speaking to him after the event I remember how he said the previous day's ups and downs had left him emotionally drained and I vowed not to let this ever happen to me again.


Of course, if I am fighting on the first day you will always find me screaming my lungs out on the second. It’s not that I want to be cold, it's just part of the job.

We don’t get off to the best of starts on Saturday with James, Iain Feenan (-73kg) and Matt Purssey (-73kg) all falling in the first round to tough opponents. Colin Oates and Faith Pitman progress a little further but also come unstuck before the medal stages.

Sarah Clark (-63kg) continues to consistently be in and around the medals but this time has to settle for fifth place after losing to a Chinese opponent in the bronze medal match.

I have to apologise for not putting in more details about their fights but like I have already said I try not to get to involved the day before I compete.

By the time Clarky fights her medal match I am already long gone from the stadium, back at the hotel packing my bags and trying to relax. I go for a walk to get some fresh air and also collect some last minute supplies.

I know I have everything I need in my kit bag but I do one last check before heading to bed, old habits die hard!

The last thing I do before going to sleep is check my weight. People have said that the first fight in a judo competition is the weigh-in and to a certain extent it is true. Without making the weight there is no event so you have to make sure everything is right. There is no room for error.

The weigh-in starts at 7am on Sunday so I go down at 6.40am to check again that everything is how it should be. My weight is fine 80.7 kg so I head back up to my room.

Most of the time a weigh-in room resembles a battle scene from a gladiatorial movie with people pushing and shoving to get to the front and a mass of semi-naked bodies all battling to get to the scales.

I find this more stressful than it is worth so I usually check before the weigh in starts and then go back to my room for half an hour so that the scrum will die down and I can walk in a civil manner to the scales.

After the weigh-in it is important to refuel and rehydrate, and while I am doing this I check my draw. The draw is done on the Friday evening but I don’t look until the morning I fight.


Some people like to see straight away who they will have to fight and others wait until the last minute. I have done both but now I always wait until first thing on contest morning as I think it helps me sleep if I don’t have to keep fighting that first match over and over again in my dreams!

I discuss the draw with Billy at breakfast and we decide on a strategy. Billy will have known since the draw was made on Friday so he always has ideas but we have worked together so long now the best thing is to bounce our ideas off each other.

We try not to look past the first match as that is always the most important one and the sport throws up so many upsets that you can never be sure who will be your next fight anyway.

I am told that it could be 3 or 4pm before my weight even starts but very rarely does a judo tournament run to an exact timetable so I am always ready for the unexpected.

The reason for the possible late start is down to TV coverage. The French have unearthed a phenomenon called Teddy Riner, a 7ft tall, charismatic, 18-year-old who has shot to fame by winning both the European and World SENIOR heavyweight titles last year.

He still has three years left as a junior so it is really a ridiculous achievement and France has rightly taken him to their heart and are turning him into a superstar.

Judo is a major sport in France and the tournoi will compete with Six Nations rugby coverage on mainstream TV over the weekend so the organisers want Teddy's +100kg final to be on primetime three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

In the end it turns out that I will start at 11.30am so I am down in the warm-up hall for 10am to get strapped up, ready to go.

I warm up with Iain Feenan, who fought the previous day and is my training partner back in Edinburgh, so it’s ideal for me. I feel sharp and strong and by the time my 40-minute warm-up is done I am sweating bucket loads and ready for action.

Of course the nerves are there. For all you younger judoka, I’ll let you into a secret, they never really go away. You just get better and better at dealing with them and using the nervous energy to your advantage rather than letting them eat you up.

There is always that moment in the days or hours before fighting where you ask yourself if you really want to put yourself through this all again, is it worth it?

Would it be easier just not to turn up, not to fight, not to test yourself? But the answer always seems to be the same and that’s what finds me standing mat-side, wiping my feet slowly backwards across the mat listening to Billy behind me drumming in the fight plan. Ready to fight.

I end up winning my first three matches in unspectacular fashion but against the best in the world sometimes its not about beautiful judo. Winning ugly is still winning.

I lose in the quarter-final to a Frenchman. It is a slightly contentious loss, he dropped in for a throw and I saw the opportunity to strangle him so started to roll for the strangle. The referee obviously didn’t see it like that and awarded a score for his throw and this is what I lose the match on.


It could have gone the other way but in Paris against a Frenchman you have to expect the crowd to influence things in his favour and in hindsight maybe rolling for the strangle was risky.

That puts me in the repechage (another knockout to the bronze medal) and I win against two world-class fighters from Estonia and Azerbaijan to put me in the bronze medal match. Again it’s a tight scrappy fight but I come through it to win bronze, my first ever Paris Tournament medal and a result that will keep me as number 1 on the European ranking list.

My day started at 6.40am and my last fight finished at 7.30pm, but its not quite finished yet. Even as the fans spill out into the Paris night I have one more job to do. I have been selected for drug testing and have to try to pee, not that easy when you’ve had seven fights in a day!

Eventually I manage to “perform” for the testers and get to go see my folks, who have come out to watch. I go back to my hotel, get the doc to remove the bandage on my head, I took a nasty butt during my quarter-final and got quite a bad cut on my eyebrow, grab a quick shower and then get to go meet my mum and dad with Sal (my girlfriend and the No 1 GB fighter at -70kg) to get some food. It’s 10.30pm by the time we get out to eat but its worth it after the previous days of dieting!

My body and fingers are sore and will be worse by the morning but for now I can enjoy spending a tiny bit of free time with mum and dad, which is nice.

The British Team end up with just the one medal but three fifth places, Karina Bryant (+78kg) and Michelle Rogers (-78kg) adding to the one Sarah Clark got on Saturday.

Most of the team will fight again next weekend in World Cup events in Hungary (women) and Austria (men). With only four qualifying events left to pick up points it really is nail-biting times.

I am fortunate enough to have automatically qualified the -81kg with bronze at last year's World Championships so I could choose which events to fight in.

Next up for me is Hamburg Super World Cup in two weeks but for now I am back to training at the international camp in Paris. Winning a medal is great but it does mean there will be plenty of people gunning for me at the camp. No rest for the wicked I suppose!!

I hope you’ve got a little bit of an idea about how a judo player lives his life. I’ll be checking back in here regularly between now and the Games. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Oh, one last thing. Apologies to the passport control guy at Heathrow who told Karina he had put a cheeky fiver on me at the bookies! We had no idea you could bet on judo players. It was just funny for us to hear that anyone knew who we were, judo players are so used to being anonymous. If only you could get each way bets on judo he’d have been quids in!! Sorry buddy.

Until next time.

Euan