What a year is has been for Team Azerbaijan, collecting European, World and Olympic titles, not only as senior athletes but across the board from cadets and juniors as well. Closing out the year for the younger Azerbaijani athletes was the U23 European Championships, where some of their successful cadet and junior competitors were looking for more glory.
Overseeing the team in Pila, Poland, was Performance Director, Richard TRAUTMANN. Already the work begins in a new cycle, but what does a performance director look for and how have the results of the Olympic Games impacted his team and the wider judo community in Azerbaijan?
In the country I’m working for, we are well known for early bloomers, for early success and this is good and bad. The good side, well it is always nice to have results, but sometimes you pay a price for it. We cannot get enough of them to the top level of seniors. When you’re physically stronger than the others, mature earlier, you have some easy wins, maybe even the judo is not so well developed and as the success is really very important in the country, important for the clubs financially, the focus for the club coach doesn’t go beyond this immediate success, it doesn’t matter for them if they become a good senior, they don’t benefit.
What we want to develop is coach education, right now they are simply going off their own experiences, passed on from their own coaches, from a totally different time. We have a lot to improve on but now in this new period we have clear goals for the cadets, what they need to do, need to know, the skills they should have already. In the U23 Europeans, it gives us a chance to send athletes who are not the number or number two, for example the -60kg gold medallist [Huseyn Allahyarov], we have seen him working so so hard, but he has never seen a cadet or junior championships, he has almost no results, but with this we can give him the opportunity, he was hungry. Also in -73kg, Rufat Shovlatov, he didn’t win gold, but this medal means he will be funded for another year. Without the result, he probably would have joined the work force. We want to demonstrate that we recognise them, and we will reward them if they are doing as we ask. It is not only about the result.
I think if we sent our top players in every category we would win a lot, we are missing athletes from France, Russia, we would be in a great position, but for what? We don’t gain anything, some of them have already fought in the Olympic Games!
Judo is a fighting sport and there is always a risk of injury, but for Trautmann, it felt like it was too much, too often,
I felt that we were having too many injuries, you know I come from Germany, before you do anything, we pay for the insurance, but in judo sometimes you need to take a risk, then on the other hand, Azerbaijan is the opposite, it’s an all-in style. Like I said, there is a lot of financial incentive so the coaches and athletes are always pushing, they want to fight and ignore their injuries.
Now we have a big support from the federation to change this, in the end, only healthy athletes win medals. So I took everybody out after the Olympics, not just the first team, but number two, training partners as well, they were all checked for injuries, if they needed surgeries, rehabilitation, and in the end, it was almost 20. They could have pushed to fight in the U23s but I don’t want a result here, I want a result in Los Angeles in 2028.
It is my job to convince these athletes that they won’t be forgotten, that the reason we are keeping them out to recover is because they are precious. As it was different in the past I cannot blame them for feeling as if they’d be replaced, from their experience, they’re right.
Before the Olympics, it is something I really underestimated, the pressure is unbelievable. Our president explained to me that if we had success in Paris that we would have possibilities we could only dream of. I thought okay, typical politics, but in fact it was true.
We really had great ideas from the president, big possibilities, and now we can really level up. We can bring in more experts, we are opening a boarding school for 500 judoka and this is a huge project, with three goals. I like this because it is really based in judo goals, the first is not to win Olympic medals, it is to use judo as an opportunity for people from the countryside who would typically go to work aged 14 or 15, to go earn a degree and be able to study anywhere in the world. This programme will be in the regions because 90% of our judoka are from Baku, but talent is everywhere. There will a talent identification programme all over the country and at aged 12/13 they will come to the boarding school.
There will be three aims, one is high performance, producing potential Olympic medals; second is to have well educated judoka, and they could become well educated coaches, and the third, most important I think, you want people who have a close connection to judo because the sport gives them the chance of their life. They may go study economics, law, politics, but they stay inside judo. Maybe their success will help support the federation, maybe someone is a journalist and supports us, or a politician. This is the vision of our president and I support this.
Author: Thea Cowen