Hello Judo fans…

The European Championships did not go the way I had hoped, as a tightly fought match with Mikalai Barkouski went the way of the Belarussian by two passivity penalties to one.

He went on to win bronze, viciously dispatching his opponents in his other victories during the day, but there is no comfort in knowing that I took him all the way to the wire.

When you’re younger and you go out of tournaments it’s the end of the world but nowadays I’m alright when I lose. I sleep quite well when I’ve gone out of a tournament. When I don’t sleep is when I’ve done really well.

The sport lends itself to upsets. Just because you’re one of the top players in the world it doesn’t mean that you’re definitely going to get to the semis and then it’ll be close from there. In every fight your tournament is on the line from the first round, all the way through.

The way I deal with it is that you have to be best prepared for each type of fight and each player that you can be. You have to do what you do to the best of your ability in training and then try and put that into practice in the tournament, and then what happens after that happens.

You can only prepare the best that you can prepare. And if you come up against someone that has some crazy style that completely doesn’t suit your type of judo then hopefully you’ve come up with a solution in training to that.  And if you haven’t, you just have to do the best you can on the mat.

Sport’s your life when you’re doing it at such a high level and nothing’s more important. Eventually you get a bit older and you realise that there are things that are more important. It’s a massive cliché but a lot of it’s about the journey. 

If you only judge yourself and you think that people only judge you on how many medals you’ve got round your neck, then you’re probably going to be a bit sad when you finish your sport anyway. Of course it’s the most important thing in the world right now, of course everyone wants to be Olympic Champion, but you’ve got to remember that the people around you that like you don’t like you because you’ve got a medal around your neck, they like you because you’re a decent person.

With the Europeans out of the way the Olympic team is going to be together and that’s going to be when it really hits home. Up to now it’s not been something that’s totally on my mind. I’m training as hard as I can for it but I’m trying not to think about it all the time. I’m sure that it’ll all ramp up soon. I’ve never been to an Olympic Games so it’s going to be very difficult for me, but I’m going to try until my tournament day is out of the way to treat it as just a tournament. It’s not the Olympic Games, it’s just a tournament.

Now the team goes to South Africa for three weeks conditioning, then we come home for a week, then we all go to Japan for three weeks.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Euan