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:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)