Indeed I've just been to the site of a French TV sports station where Judo is hidden away in "Other Sports" ironically with among others handball
That's my problem with it. The "spectator" aspect is only during the olympics and I don't think its a good enough excuse to make changes to the sport for the other 3 years and X number of days random people will watch it. Besides, Greco has no leg attacks and people still don't watch that much. TKD has flashy kicks and still isn't as popular as, say, swimming or track.
I totally agree with that. I just wasn't as elaborate Edit: What the hell...? I meant "eloquent" And to be honest: I think, that those people who watch it once every four years, really couldn't care less about the rule set. It doesn't make it much easier to understand, when you never cared for it before. After all, it's not like that the majority of the olympic spectators were able to say: Hey, look, they changed *whatever they changed now*! Four years ago, they were allowed to do that! FIFA doesn't get the stupid idea to say: Hey, we should make soccer easier to understand: Let's just use one goal, so people who don't even care for the sport don't get confused.
Which cuts to the real issue of Judo as a spectator sport which has nothing whatsoever to do with techniques and everything to do with people just not understanding it. The legs argument only makes sense if people only won by Ippon, but the truth is that most matches still don't end with Ippon. As such you're into a scoring system that people don't really understand. Judo is already inoculated against Greco's problems because it penalises stalling. Wrestling's problems again had nothing to do with what they were doing and everything to do with what they weren't doing. Watching two guys stall for two minutes and then crazily scramble for 30 seconds was not entertaining.
The Olympics are only every 4 years, but all the individual athlete funding and the majority of the national body funding is allocated based on that one tournament.
Judo used to be won by ipon or submission only. I think that adding other scores was part of the problem. Well, I enjoy doing Judo but part of me wishes that there was a bjc dojo nearby...
It just keeps getting worse and worse. They look desperate now. http://www.bjjee.com/articles/judo-federation-counters-migration-to-mma-by-creating-mja-mixed-jujitsu-arts/
I read that earlier too. But so far it seems more to be a (maybe a little crazy) idea of some French club. I'm not entirely sure, but I think MMA has even e worse reputation in France then in some other countries, so this seems to be more like trying to jump on the MMA train, but not make it look "as bad as MMA is". So far I doubt, that this will work out. But I might be wrong ^^
This is just the French Federation and it might be a good thing - depending on the format it takes. I'm all for a format that would permit Judoka and BJJ to fight each other without one side or the other being at a material disadvantage as a result of the ruleset. It might end up looking a lot like freestyle judo.