Jimmy Pedro is an American judo competitor and coach, World champion, 3x World medalist, 2x Olympic medalist; we talk about his father (Big Jim Pedro Sr), his early career, the times he wanted to quit, overcoming a neck injury, coming back from retirement, the life of an athlete vs the life of a coach, a system for developing elite-level judoka, Japanese vs Russian judo, periodization, a weekly program for an elite-level judoka, toughest moment as a coach, watching Travis Stevens lose the semifinals at the Olympics, mental game, visualization, IJF, judo as a spectator sport, the future of judo in the United States and the rest of the world, and more.

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If I told you right now that I have with me, I brought, I told you I'm Russian, I brought with me back in the car, 2 guys, they're waiting outside, both are 73 kg players.

They happen to be in the top 10 of the world.

1 is Russian, the other is Japanese, and I'll give you $1 million if you beat 1 of them in judo, in a judo match.

A Russian or a Japanese, which 1 would you face?

I think I'd take my shot against the Russian.

And the reason is they're so much more technical.

The Russians obviously have great judo explosive power.

I mean, it's a tough decision either way, but when I look back at my statistics in which style of player I beat more often, I had more success against Russians than I did against Japanese.

I'm here at the Pedro Judo Center talking with Jimmy, a legendary judo competitor and coach.

He represented the United States at 4 Olympics, in

He medaled in 3 world championships, winning gold in 99.

He has coached many, most elite level American Jidoka, including Kayla Harrison, Ronda, Ronda Rousey, Travis Stevens, Rick Hawn, Alex Otiano, Taraji Williams, Roddy Ferguson, the Roddy Ferguson.

They work together, as many people know, and many others.

4 of those people have been on this podcast.

Your first judo coach was your dad, still your judo coach.

Can you talk about your relationship with your dad when you first started judo?

Did he put a lot of pressure on you to win?

So my dad, for those of you that have ever had the privilege of meeting him, he's unforgettable.

There was no such thing as I don't want to go to judo today.

You know, we only had practice when I was a little boy, 3 days a week, but I was at the dojo 5, 6 days a week running around the mats and watching classes and things like that.

But my dad was very hard on me as a youngster, pushed me to compete, pushed me to train.

He gave me exercise routines to do when I wasn't doing judo.

I had to do conditioning off the mat, you know, that he'd run me through circuit training and stuff like that.

So, yeah, my dad was a very demanding father, but his mentality was that he knew judo would be good for me, not just to become a great athlete, but for the life lessons that I would learn through the sport of judo and what it would do to help me become a better person.

Yeah, many parents want their kids to eat vegetables because it's good for them and eat healthy because it's what they want.

My father wanted me to do judo because of what it could do for me.

And so, I mean, that is a story of a lot of greats in sport and wrestling and Judo.

So the question for me is, you're a father now, you're a coach now, do you and did your dad struggle with that balance between letting your kid do whatever they want and dragging them, kicking and screaming to training?

Well, I'm a different father than my dad was, but I also have, my kids have to live in different shoes than I had to live in.

And he fell short of making the Olympics himself.

So I was almost doing it with him and for him.

Whereas my kids feel like they're doing it for me.

Every tournament they go to, they have a ton of pressure because the whole world is watching them because they're Jimmy Pedro's son.

And there's a lot of parents that can be obnoxious.

And when their kid beats my kid, it's the biggest deal in the world.

So my kids have to deal with all that pressure that no kid should have to deal with.

I give my children the choice of what sports to play.

Of course, as young individuals, they all did judo.

They all competed up until they were teenagers.

But at that point, I let them decide what sports they want to play, what they want to do.

Right now, I have a son who's ranked number 1 in the nation in the sport of wrestling as a sophomore in high school.

I have a daughter that went on to play hockey and softball and now she's a freshman in college at Bentley University.

But I think that the judo training that they did get when they were young helped mold them as individuals and as good people.

And so I wanted them to do it for that same reason.

So you think it's possible, well certainly it's possible, but do you think that's the path to success is it doesn't have to require excessive pressure from the coaches and the parenting in the early years?

I think everybody is different in response to that pressure differently.

Had I been given a choice, I could tell you right now, I probably wouldn't ever have made any Olympic teams or I wouldn't have excelled in the sport of judo at all because it's not something I would have pursued.

My dad didn't give me the choice and it wasn't until I was about 15 years old where I started to become a man and I started to really want to do the sport of judo for myself.

Up until that point, I was too immature and didn't understand the dynamic of what was going on.

And, you know, I felt all that pressure from my father and I despised going to training sometimes or, you know, it was difficult.

But as 15, 16, I was like, Hey, I'm pretty damn good at this thing.

I like winning, you know, and I like being around other athletes and I get to see the, at that, you know, at 15, 16, you start to travel, you start to go away from home, you go into camps in Oklahoma or Florida, you're going on trips overseas and it starts to become fun as a teenager, right?

So that's when I started doing it for me and that's when it really became enjoyable.

And so in those years, late teens, how did your relationship evolve with your dad?

You know, I was always a self-motivated kid anyway, but really when I was 15 or 16, I turned the corner and I decided that I was given

all the time and my dad truly became not just a father, but I saw him as a great coach.

Somebody that had a wealth of knowledge, that knew how to train athletes, that knew how to get the most out of his athletes and that actually exposed me to the world.

I think the biggest credit I can give to my father as a coach is that he sent me away to learn from other people.

The biggest mistake most coaches make is that they keep their students to themselves and they hold them back from reaching their potential because they're afraid that that student's going to go on and learn something special from somebody else and no longer give their original coach credit.

And especially as a father, that must be a scary thing to sort of give up your son to somebody else.

Right, but my dad had said, he said, Sana, technically I've taken you as far as I can take you.

And since I never made the Olympic team, I wanna surround you with greatness.

I want you to go see that these other athletes are just people too.

And that they're not these heroes that you put on big pedestals, but they're everyday ordinary people that make mistakes, that fall down, that get back up.

And I want you to be around them because champions, be around champions to be a champion.

See how they act, see how they behave, see how they think and also learn from them.

And my dad sent me to all the best coaches in America at the time, which were Erwin Cohen, who recently passed away and Patrick Burris, who was on 2 Olympic teams.

And I went to Neil Adams in England and I learned from Neil and sent me to Japan and sent me to Germany and Gunther Neureiter and I learned from some good coaches in Japan and I picked up something everywhere I went.

My dad said, hey, I'm going to send you away.

I want you to bring back a new technique from everywhere you go and show me what it is.

And I can tell you that as I gathered all that, all those new techniques and all that new knowledge, to this day I can tell you who I learned all of the different techniques that I did in my career from, which is amazing, you know.

So that's the biggest mistake I think that most coaches make is they don't allow their students to flourish and to be exposed to the rest of the world.

And I give my dad a lot of credit for having the foresight to do that for me.

Is now on a slightly darker side, was there as a competitor, was there ever a time you considered quitting Judo?

Absolutely, every champion wants to quit.

When I was only 16 years old, I went to the U S open in judo.

It's at the time, it was 1 of the hardest tournaments in the world because the whole world loved coming to America to compete.

So we had Japanese and we had Russians and we had French and we had Brazilians and in as a young boy, it was a super hard tournament to compete in.

And at that tournament, I had a great day.

I lost to Eddie Liddy who took third in the Olympics in 84.

And then I battled back and I was fighting for a bronze medal against the guy from Korea.

And I scored in the first like 30 seconds, I threw the Korean guy.

And he was a man, he was 24 years old, strong as heck and physical and technical.

And I was just this little scrappy wiry 16 year old, right?

And then he just grabbed me and manhandled me across the match.

I just started shaking my gi and snapping my gi.

And I ended up getting 3 penalties and losing the fight.

He yelled and he screamed at me so, he embarrassed me in front of everybody.

That I, according to my father, I fought afraid.

I was scared to lose, but physically I couldn't match this guy.

He was, so anyway, long story short, I went out in the snow, took my gear off, laid down in Colorado Springs in the snow and just cried.

Just fought my heart out, fought like 8 fights.

I lost for a bronze medal at 16 years old in 1 of the toughest tournaments and I felt like a failure.

my dad, and I felt like my dad hated me, you know, and he embarrassed me in front of everybody.

I had another time, I was in Japan and I had spent 6 weeks training in Japan and I went to the Kano Cup.

And the Kano Cup is 1 of the best tournaments in the world.

And at that tournament, I sucked a lot of weight after being in Japan for 6 weeks.

I sucked a ton of weight and I was all excited to fight.

Well, my first round was against Sergey Kosminin.

First match of the tournament, Kozminian threw me free pwn.

And then so my- and Kozminian went on and he won the tournament.

So I went 0-2 in the Kano Cup after being in Japan for 6 weeks, dieting and losing a lot of weight, made all this sacrifice.

I remember sitting on the steps at the Budokan, you know, at 19 years old thinking to myself, I hate this sport, I just want to quit, this stinks.

Every champion wants to quit, I love that.

The hardest thing, I think the thing that most people don't realize is that they only see champions as winners.

They only see the times when they succeed.

They don't see those days where they struggled or they lost or they failed or the day in training where they got their butts whooped, right?

Or those tournaments where they just fought miserable.

Nobody ever hears about those days, but we all go through it because nobody goes undefeated in their career.

So really what makes champions is, how do you wanna go out?

You know, do you want that to be your last competition?

Do you wanna go out as a loser, as a quitter?

Or are you gonna suck it up, learn from the loss, dig deeper, get better, re-motivate yourself and become a champion.

And I think that was my mindset my whole career.

And quite honestly, that same guy, Kozminian, he beat me in the 91 Worlds the next year.

And then finally in 92, I got him in the finals of the Italian tournament, the Guido Siani, and I beat him in that tournament.

So, perseverance and tenacity, and sometimes it pays off.

Is there something you regret about your early judo years in terms of training?

Something you wish you would have done differently?

I think early days, no, because I played a lot of sports as a kid.

So I had a good balance to my adolescent years and my childhood where I got to play a lot of sports and learn a lot of things about teamwork and really found out that the best thing about judo and wrestling and individual sports is that you ultimately decide how good you're going to be.

You don't have to rely on the rest of your team or you don't have to worry about having a crappy coach or being in a bad situation.

So I don't think I regret anything as a youngster other than I wish I could have enjoyed it more as a child.

You know, I went undefeated in judo until I was 11 years old.

I didn't lose a match until I was 11 years old.

And that was the finals of the national championships.

So think about the pressure of going undefeated for all those years.

Right, and having your father always bump you up to the next weight class or fight the harder person or in the next age category, you're always challenging yourself.

So to have all that pressure and push the envelope and the threshold, I had anxiety about every tournament I went into up until I finally lost.

You talk often, you yourself are a graduate of Brown.

You talk often about the value of education.

So do you think there's room for life outside of judo for somebody who wants to make the podium at the Olympics?

Unquestionably, I believe that athletes who live a balanced life, who don't put all of their energy into just sport, end up becoming better athletes.

Because when you fail in sport, you feel like a complete failure if that's all you do.

But if you have something else that you're pursuing parallel to the sport, whether it's an education or whether it's a career or whether it's family.

If you have something else in your life that you can put your energy to that makes you feel good about yourself, then they kind of balance each other out, right?

So if I fail in sport but I get an A on this exam, I still feel good about myself.

Or if I do lousy in school but I just won this tournament, I feel good about myself because I found some reward in something I did.

Whereas if All you do is sport and you fail, then you have nothing else.

You feel like I sacrificed everything I gave, everything for this moment and it didn't happen.

And that's why I encourage my athletes to either teach other students, get involved in some other way.

Like they can take pride in their students winning tournaments.

Or like I said, education or work or something else to provide some sort of enjoyment.

So that's not, you don't think that's a negative distraction to that 1 singular focus towards the...

I think there's certain times where, obviously 6 months before the Olympic Games, it's time to focus and put all your energy into sport.

Okay, so I took, when I was at Brown, I took a break from Brown, and I focused just on training in judo in the Olympics.

You know, but I had never really put my life on hold for sport.

I had kids, you know, before I won the 99 worlds, I mean, I had 2 kids already and 1 on the way.

So I was a father and coming home from a long training trip or competition run overseas and coming home and seeing your 2 and 3 year olds run up to you and you're like, daddy, you forget about that guy that just whooped your butt in Russia or wherever it was, right?

You know, it brings new perspective to life.

at the Worlds and in 2004 at the Olympics and many times in between.

That's at least 13 years of being 1 of the best judo competitors in the world.

So what would you attribute that longevity to?

Well, like I said, I Wanted to be the best in the world.

So my motivation was to be world or Olympic champion

Yes Well, and that also plays into every You know, everything happens for a reason and everything plays into what you ultimately become.

Can you describe that, by the way, for people that don't know?

I actually was in a tournament in the finals of Korea and I got picked up and thrown on my head in that tournament.

And really instead of taking the fall and just losing, I stuck my head out and I came right down on the top of my head and then my feet went over and I did a bridge.

I got up and I finished the fight and I lost.

But then going home on the airplane, I noticed that it got harder and harder to lift my chin up off of my chest.

By the time I landed in Boston, the neck and the disc had swollen so much that it was hitting the spinal cord.

And so my chin got pinned to my chest and then I just had radiating, shooting pain down my arm into my hand and it was numb.

First MRI, doctor said, you will never, he said, Jimmy, I'm sorry, but you will never do sports again in your life.

He said, I hope that someday I can get you to become just a normal functioning human being again.

I remember being in the elevator at 23 years old Thinking that my entire career is over and at the same time I couldn't sleep because I couldn't lay down in a bed My My chin had to stay here and my arm had to stay here or else the pain was excruciating.

If I lifted my head in any way, I just couldn't move.

Well, that whole arm and that chest muscle and tricep shrunk to 0.

All the nerve damage happened on the right side.

So I slept many a nights just sitting in a traction unit with a weight over the door in my dorm room.

And I would just sit there with my head trying to pull up and I would try to sleep because it was the only time I could ever get comfortable.

I had about 6 months of living like that.

The entire time I was injured and the pain wouldn't go away in the arm.

It was just like a dull throbbing pain shooting down the arm and you had no feeling in your hand or your, so I knew it was serious.

And I tell you, I sometimes the only thing I could do was I would drink like 8 or 10 beers to pass out.

I didn't sleep in a bed for that whole time.

And then even when it started, I got lucky.

And I think I just got lucky over time the nerve regenerated itself the disc started to go back in I never had surgery and I started getting a little bit of range of motion back and then I was so excited I went back to the doctor and I said, doc, I know you said I'm never gonna do judo again, but like I can move my head now.

And the guy was like, you've made a lot of progress.

And you know, he said, okay, now still, I don't want you to run.

I said, but I want you to go back in the weight room and I want you to start retraining that muscle and that those muscles to move again.

And I remember the first day on the Nautilus machine, no weight.

I pulled the pin out and my arm was just like this And I would just straighten it and I would pull it back and I would straighten it and just keep Trying to train my muscles to move.

Yeah first time on the bench press Just the bar.

I don't remember all these girls in the weight room at Brown and They're all pushing weight and I remember taking the bar off and I went trying to get that out and I just, yeah, it just shook and it just, and it took a lot of rehab to get that.

And then finally, over time, I got stronger and stronger and he said, I started to train neck muscles and traps and it came back and it took about 9 months to be back strong enough where I could get back on the mat and start doing what you call me's and start to train again.

And then almost 10 years after that, he went to the Olympics.

So how is the Jimmy Pedro of 1991 different from the 1 of 2004?

So at the beginning of the dominance to the end of the...

I would say that the young Jimmy Pedro was fearless, was raw, talented, just gritty and got after it.

Yeah, not so explosive though because I cut a lot of weight when I was younger, so I wasn't so explosive in

My best years in the sport of Judo were between

and 99 was when I was explosive, technical, really strong on the mat, physically real explosive.

Those are my best years in the sport 95 to 99.

In fact 95 I Look back and I should have been in the finals of the world's that year.

I could have been world champion in 95 I lost to a Korean in the semifinals by a split decision.

And it was a split flag decision that I thought I won.

In that year, the Japanese who won the world's 3 months later, I beat him pretty easily in Germany.

So I thought I should have been world champion 95.

And then 2 weeks before the 97 world championships, which I was undefeated like the whole year winning everything, 2 weeks before I was supposed to go to world championships, I went to a training camp that the coach talked me into going to.

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Jimmy Pedro: Judo | Take It Uneasy Podcast