Icho, Kaori Icho, Olympic champion, female wrestling

Kaori Icho: Pursuing Her Own Perfection

Thursday, September 11, 2014 - 16:20 By Tim Foley

When Kaori Icho won her ninth world championship Thursday night in Tashkent absent were the backflips, tears and group hugs of previous champions. The Japanese wrestler fulfilled her requirement to wave the flag of her home country, but otherwise shooke hands, bowed off the mat and walked off the stage.

Icho’s unaffected reaction to winning a world title might be attributed to her three Olympic gold medals and eight previous world championships. All told, the Japanese great has won a total of 12 world titles, leaving her second all-time in female wrestling behind teammate Saori Yoshida who has 15 world titles on her resume. Those numbers make Icho and Yoshida inarguably the two greatest female wrestlers to ever walk the planet.

Despite the heady assertions and a 172-match winning streak, Icho is not interested in penning history or acquiring titles. She doesn’t want another gold medal for her bedroom or sponsorship money for her bank account. What Icho wants and why she still wrestles can’t be counted or written down.

It has to be seen.

Kaori Icho headed into the 2008 Olympic Games a woman under pressure. She was the defending 2004 champion and hadn’t lost a match since 2003. The media burden in Japan was growing and she felt a growing dissatisfaction with the sport and all its offerings.

Icho’s solution was to discuss retirement. Warm and thoughtful, Icho knew that female wrestling was still in its infancy and she could step off the mat as a two-time Olympic champion at the age of 24. Icho was young enough to conquer something new, maybe a sport, maybe a job.

Her older sister, Chiharu, an eventual two-time Olympic silver medalist, would also be competing in the Beijing Games and had already announced her retirement – a declaration that gave Icho the opening she needed to slough off the stress and unwanted attention of her wrestling career, should she choose to follow her sister.

In addition to her sister, Icho was sharing her Olympic journey with teammate and friend Saori Yoshida, who’d also won an Olympic gold in 2004 and was mentored by her father and national team coach, Eikatsu Yoshida.

“I know that the gold medals mean a lot to Saori,” says Icho. “This is what motivates her and what motivates many wrestlers. I was like this, too, but it wasn’t right for me. Something wasn’t working.”

Icho floated the idea of retirement and, in a country cued into the plans of their most dominant Olympians, the rumors reached the press. “I never made the decision to retire, but I did need a change. I very much needed a change.”

Icho had been training at the same club near Nagoya for much of her life. When she finally took a moment to look up from the mats at age 24 she wanted change.

“I had the same training partners and the same coach,” explains Icho. “ Nothing was wrong with them, I just couldn’t get stronger without something new. If I was going to stay in wrestling I needed to find a new path.”

Of course, Icho would win in Beijing. And, after her title was announced, she threw her arms in the air and beamed a smile. But that wasn’t from an appreciation of her achievement as much as an alleviation of the stress.

Icho sat out the 2008 World Championships – the model for other world meets for women run concurrently in Olympic years until 2016. Yoshida wrestled, and as she always seems to do, she won.

Icho chose not to retire, but she did decide to leave Japan. She hadn’t left wrestling, but she’d left Japan and moved to Canada.

“I wanted to experience life overseas and see how foreigners trained,” says Icho. “The biggest difference that I saw was how well the athletes and coaches communicated.”

In Japan the athlete-coach relationship is simple: coaches give instructions and wrestlers listen. In Canada, the coaches and the athletes had relationships; they enjoyed each other’s company on a personal level.

“I envied their relationships,” says Icho.

Icho traveled home to Japan, on occasion, but spent the majority of the next eight months training in Canada. She learned English, sat out the 2009 world championships and, in the time away from battling in competition, rediscovered what she loved about the sport -- and it wasn’t winning gold medals.

In addition to envying the close coach-athlete connection she saw in Canada, Icho saw that training methods varied from country to country. Sheltered and cared for in Nagoya, she’d never seen training that didn’t include running (which she dislikes) and was able to use more power lifts in her strength training (which she likes).

When Icho returned to Japan she chose to spend much of her time at the national training center for male wrestlers and looked for college programs and coaches she liked. She spent weeks absorbing new techniques, and also new attitudes – how one school trained varied from another, and from that she cobbled together a loose emotional and physical sketch of what it would take for her to get back on the mats for competition. Icho became more focused on the techniques and chess match of wrestling than on the aggression so often used as a skill. She discovered that passion could always be defeated by pressure or circumstance, but technical acumen was unbeatable, and its acquisition is, in and of itself, fulfilling.

That Icho is uniquely talented cannot be questioned. Her speed and athleticism are evident to even the most casual wrestling observer, but that she’s more spry, more active and more technical runs counterintuitive to the sport’s natural maturation. Thirty-something wrestlers slow down; they are more often injured and often eschew finer movements in favor of fewer movements.

Icho, who turns 30 in June, says that her ongoing improvements are a result of training with men who focus her on better techniques and tougher training regiments. With harder work in tougher scenarios, Icho believes her body will more often retain new techniques.

“Men are more profound in their detail and the moves are more complicated and that makes learning them a serious process.”

Icho refuses to put an expiration date on her career. If she were as poetic in her career path as she is on the mat she might decide to wrestle until the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Should she win every championship from now until then, she’d end her career with 18 world titles including five Olympic gold medals. But the titles have never mattered, and she won’t start creating storylines for herself.

“I’m not sure when the end will come for me, but I will be wrestling all my life,” says Icho. “I am a wrestler, but I will know when my time as competitor must give way to my time as a coach.”

For now, Icho wrestles one match at a time. Always wondering if she can achieve perfection in her lifetime, knowing that her own expectations become loftier with each technique mastered.

“My goal, my only goal, is to get to closer to the image in my head of what wrestling can be,” says Icho. “Competition is important and it will enrich your life.”

”I’m only now seeing that improvement is what gives me satisfaction and puts a smile on my face."

#JapanWrestling

Fujinami cruises in test run at 57kg, earns ticket to World U23

Tuesday, April 15, 2025 - 07:47 By Ken Marantz

TOKYO (April 14) -- Paris Olympic champion Akari FUJINAMI took her new, slightly bulked-up body out for its first spin on Sunday, and it was just as high-performance as ever.

Fujinami, the reigning world and Olympic champion at women's 53kg, made her first official foray into the next Olympic weight class of 57kg, and cruised to victory in the U23 division at the Japan Junior Queens Cup in Tokyo.

"It was my first tournament at 57kg and, as the starting point at [this weight], I feel this was a good tournament to get an idea of my power at 57kg and the method for making the adjustment, all while maintaining the right amount of tension," Fujinami said.

The tournament also saw the return to the mat of Paris 62kg champion Sakura MOTOKI, who also prevailed in the U23 tournament, while recently crowned senior Asian champion Sakura ONISHI earned a chance to repeat as world U20 champion, and one-time heavyweight prodigy Ayano MORO returned in triumph at U20 from a 16-month injury absence.

Fujinami needed just two wins to win her title, winning both matches by 10-0 decision in the first period. That extended her current winning streak to 141 straight victories dating back to a loss in the final at the national junior high school championships in June 2017.

The victory also earned the 21-year-old star a place on Japan's team to the World U23 Championships, to be held Oct. 20-26 in Novi Sad, Serbia, which gives her a shot at one of the few major titles she hasn't already won.

The Junior Queens Cup, held over two days at the Tokyo Budokan in eastern Tokyo, featured competition in the four age-group divisions, U15, U17, U20 and U23, and was serving as the world qualifiers in the latter three and the Asian Championships for all four.

It was Fujinami's first individual competition since winning the 53kg gold medal at the Paris Olympics in August last year, when she added to her senior world titles from 2021 and 2023. She capped the day by finishing off Kanon YAMASHITA 10-0 in the final just inside the first-period buzzer.

"Of course, winning the title here was among my objectives," said Fujinami, who has started her third year at Nippon Sports Science University. "But I wanted to use the time here to get an actual feel for the 57kg weight class.

"In practice, I often train with others in heavier weight classes, but there is a difference between practice and actual matches. And I wanted to get that match feeling. For sure, I could feel the four-kilogram difference, but it didn't seem that big."

Akari FUJINAMI (JPN) makes her debut at 57kg at the Japan Junior Queens Cup. (Photo: Ikuo Higuchi / wrestling-spirits.jp)

Her only previous action since Paris was at a collegiate team tournament. Because it had just three weight classes, many participants, including Fujinami, wrestled outside of their usual division. She won both of her matches by fall.

More significantly, it was at that event that Fujinami made the eye-opening announcement that she was moving up to 57kg, citing the difficulty of cutting weight, as well as the historic aspect that no woman wrestler has ever won a second straight Olympic gold after moving to a higher weight class.

Fujinami, who said she never considered making a detour at 55kg, has been spending time looking for the right balance of adding weight while not losing the speed and agility that have become her trademark.

"I won't be making big changes to my style of wrestling and what has worked for me, but I will adopt and add things that fit my style so I can make progress and get to point where I'm stronger at 57kg,"she said.

The Junior Queens Cup provided the first test run in preparation for a much bigger challenge coming up. Fujinami is certain to face a significantly higher level of competition at the Meiji Cup All-Japan Invitational Championships in June, which will serve as the second of two domestic qualifiers for this year senior World Championships.

"The Meiji Cup in June will be the big test, and I realized here the aspects in which I want to get stronger," Fujinami said.

The world champion also said she is working on expanding her repertoire of techniques. "I want to expand my wrestling. I want to raise the level of my attacks so I can score points in different ways.

"There were things that worked and things that didn't work in these two matches. One thing I tried to work on was using an underhook, but it didn't go very well. I'll look at the video and make adjustments. I want to have more ways to score points beyond my specialty tackle."

Akari FUJINAMI (JPN), third from left, with other 57kg medalists. (Photo: Ikuo Higuchi / wrestling-spirits.jp)

One thing Fujinami doesn't want to do is dwell on the past -- she particularly doesn't like to talk about the winning streak. Her focus is forward, and constantly striving to improve.

"The Paris Olympics are done and in the past and I have begun my next challenge," she said. "Of course, there is the next Olympics. But before that, my thinking is to keep making progress and exceed my past self."

The elephant in the room regarding her move up to 57kg is that it puts her on a collision course with Tsugumi SAKURAI, the Paris gold medalist in that weight class. Fujinami has already beaten Sakurai, but not for such stakes as will be involved in the run-up to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Asked if there were any wrestlers at 57kg that she looked forward to facing, she replied, "Actually, there are not really any particular wrestlers that I think like that. It's more about me finding out what kind of wrestling I can do at 57kg. I have my own expectations, and I want to exceed who I was at 53kg."

One aspect of her move to 57kg that appeals to Fujinami is that she no longer has to spend time obsessing over her weight, time that can be put to much better use.

"When I was at 53kg, I would have to start focusing on cutting weight from one month before [a tournament] and that would dictate my lifestyle," she said. "But at 57kg, I can continue my regular life, which allows me to focus on the wrestling aspect."

Sakura MOTOKI (JPN), left, won the 62kg gold at the Junior Queens Cup to qualify for the World U23 Championships. (Photo: Ikuo Higuchi / wrestling-spirits.jp)

Motoki stays on track to 'Golden Grand Slam'

For Motoki, the hiatus she took after the Olympics allowed her to enjoy some culinary excesses that she normally has to avoid. She was able to get back into decent enough shape, although for better or worse, it did not play much of a factor as her weight class only had two entrants.

"I had a half-year blank since my last match at the Olympics," said Motoki, who defeated Nagisa ITO by fall in 1:02. "After getting back into shape, I thought this was good timing for getting my body back into live-match mode. I was a bit nervous.

"Partly due to cutting weight, I felt my movement was dull in the morning, but I had a long time until my match, so I was able to recover. When I was warming up, I thought, 'I feel good.' Physically, I was in pretty good condition."

Motoki also plans to enter the Meiji Cup, where she could renew her rivalry with Paris 68kg bronze medalist Nonoka OZAKI, whom she beat out for the Olympic 62kg spot. But, she said, her focus is actually more on the U23 worlds.

"This year is the last I can compete in U23," she said. "You can wrestle at the senior worlds at any age, so I'm in no rush for that. I think it's best to do it when I'm ready, both physically and technically."

A victory at the world U23 would keep Motoki on track to a feat accomplished by just two other wrestlers in history. Only compatriot Yui SUSAKI and Amit ELOR (USA) have achieved the "Golden Grand Slam" of titles on all four age-group levels along with an Olympic gold.

Motoki already has world U17 (2018) and U20 (2022) titles, and arguably got the hardest one out of the way by winning the gold in Paris. She came up short twice previously at the senior worlds, taking a bronze in 2022 and silver in 2023.

Among the other U23 winners on Sunday were senior world 55kg champion Moe KIYOOKA, who returned to that weight class after taking a silver medal at 53kg at the Asian Championships in March, and Ami ISHII at 68kg. Ishii, the world 72kg champion, has recovered from the injury that caused her to become a late withdrawal in Amman.

Sakura ONISHI (JPN) wrestles at the U20 tournament of the Junior Queens Cup. (Photo: Ikuo Higuchi / wrestling-spirits.jp)

Onishi adds to hectic schedule

In the U20 tournament on Saturday, Onishi said it was a bit difficult to turn the switch back on so fast following her golden run at 59kg at the Asian Championships.

"There was a bit of pressure," Onishi said. "After returning from the Asian Championships, I wasn't sure how to get back into the mode. That made the matches tougher here. But I was able to come around with advice and support from those around me and win the title."

Onishi, a teammate of Fujinami's at NSSU, won all three of her matches by fall or technical fall, although in the final, she gave up a 4-point counter back roll to high schooler Sae NOGUCHI as she was driving for a takedown. "That scared me for a second," Onishi said. "Finishing up my tackles has been an issue and she found an opening."

Onishi, winner at the Emperor's Cup All-Japan Championships last December, will also look to clinch a ticket to the senior worlds with a victory at the Meiji Cup. That makes for quite a hectic schedule looking ahead.

"I have collegiate events also, but my ultimate goal is to definitely win the championship at the senior worlds," Onishi said. " To do that, I have to win the title at the Meiji Cup. I know that I've set a hard schedule for myself."

Ayona MORO (JPN) Ayana MORO (JPN) won the 76kg gold in the U20 tournament, her first since the 2023 Emperor’s Cup. (Photo: Ikuo Higuchi / wrestling-spirits.jp)

Moro, who won the U20 title at 76kg with three wins in a combined 89 seconds, has spent much of the past year rehabbing from a serious neck injury and other ailments.

The 2022 world U20 champion was competing for the first time since winning the 72kg gold at the Emperor's Cup in December 2023. She had hurt her neck in the playoff with eventual Paris Olympic chamion Yuka KAGAMI for the 2023 world team in July of that year.

She decided to put the pain temporarily aside to enter the Emperor's Cup, then started rehab. She returned intermittently to the mat, but kept reinjuring the neck. On top of that, she is asthmatic and had a bout of pneumonia that left her with a constant cough. She finally returned to full-fledged training in March this year.

"I wasn't able to do much sparring [in training], I did some light rolling around and weight training, and kept up with my rehab," said Moro, who this year left Yamanashi Gakuin University and currently trains at her high school alma mater Abe Gakuin.

"I knew I wouldn't lose on strength. I tend to think negatively, but today I was unusually confident I could do well."

When told about the aggregate quickness of her victories, including a victory in the final by fall in 19 seconds over Chisato YOSHIDA, she responded, "I didn't know that. I was too nervous, it was my first time on the mat in a long time. It was so scary on the mat. I don't remember anything."

Yuu KATSUME (JPN), a world U17 champion at 46kg, won at 49kg. (Photo: United World Wrestling / Kostadin Andonov)

Potential future stars to keep an eye on

For those wanting a hint of potential stars of the future, they would be well advised to keep in mind this name: Yuu KATSUME.

Katsume swept to the U17 title at 49kg, putting her in position to win a second world title in that age group after striking gold at 46kg last year. She preceded that by winning back-to-back Asian U15 golds in 2022 and 2023.

Katsume, now a third-year student at the high school affiliated with Shigakkan University, is in the midst of putting together a Fujinami-esque winning streak.

Her most recent loss came in the fifth grade of elementary school, and that was when she entered a boys' tournament just to get a higher level of competition.

While she doesn't know the exact number of consecutive wins she has -- she added four more on Saturday, which she won by a combined score of 37-0 -- she figures it is "around 70."

Katsume will turn 17 in May, making her eligible to compete at the Emperor's Cup in December, which will also mark her senior-level debut.

Another potential star has a quite familiar name. The newly crowned 50kg champion in the U15 division was Tsukino SAKURAI, who had Paris Olympic gold medalist -- and older sister -- Tsugumi in her corner.

Tsukino is a product of the same Kochi City wrestling club run by her father in western Japan that produced not only Tsugumi, but fellow Olympic gold medalist Kotaro KIYOOKA as well as his sister Moe.

"Everyone on the team put in a lot of time and effort to help make me stronger," Tsukino said. "I'm happy to win a qualifier for an international tournament for the first time."

As is common among younger siblings, her goal is to not only catch up to her older sister, but to exceed her. (A middle sister, Hanano, recently retired after a modestly successful career at 50kg.)

"She's been to a lot of international tournaments, even the Olympics, and has won them," Tsukino said. "That makes me happy, but she has also become my goal and I want to do better than her."

Kaori Icho: Pursuing Her Own Perfection

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Fujinami cruises in test run at 57kg, earns ticket to World U23