Career
She is commonly known as 'Yawara-chan'or 'Tawara' (from the title character of Yawara!, a popular judo manga). Since she won the International Women's Judo Championships in 1990, 'Yawara-chan' has gone on to win the event every year. She has a record seven world titles and she brought home the 48 kg-category gold medal from Sydney Olympics in 2000 and the Athens Olympics in 2004.
Her 84-match winning streak was finally broken in 1996 by North Korea's Kye Sun Hui. She holds a fourth dan.
In 2003, she married Yoshitomo Tani, an Olympian and professional baseball player then with the Orix Blue Wave (now with the Yomiuri Giants). The wedding reception reportedly cost $3 million.
In Beijing in 2008 Tani, who had not been beaten in a major international competition since the Atlanta Games in 1996, saw her hopes of a third-straight gold evaporate when judges awarded penalty points to Romania's Alina Dumitru after both competitors failed to show much aggression. Looking stunned, Tani fought desperately after the final controversial penalty call, but with only seconds left she had no time to mount an attack.
She defeated Russia's Lyudmila Bogdanova for bronze. She gained her fifth Olympic medal with the bronze.
Along with Cuba's Driulys González and Australia's Mária Pekli, Tani became in 2008 the first female judoka to compete at five Olympics. The only other judokas to compete at five Olympics are Belgian Robert Van de Walle and Puerto Rican judoka-bobsledder Jorge Bonnet.
Read more about this topic: Ryoko Tani
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)