Hitoshi Saitō

Hitoshi Saitō 1988

Hitoshi Saitō ( Japanese 斎 藤 仁 , Saitō Hitoshi ; born January 2, 1961 in Aomori , Aomori Prefecture ; † January 20, 2015 in Osaka ) was a Japanese judoka and two-time Olympic heavyweight champion.

Life

Saitō attended Kokushikan University from 1979 to 1983. During this time he competed several times against the four-time world champion Yasuhiro Yamashita and lost in all major fights. At the Judo World Championships in Moscow in 1983 , Yamashita won the heavyweight division and Saitō entered the open class. In the final he defeated Vladimir Kocman from Czechoslovakia and thus joined the list of Japanese world champions in the open class who won the title from 1965 to 1991 without interruption. At the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Yamashita competed in the open class and won there. Hitoshi Saito started in the heavyweight division from 95 kilograms, his weight is given as 143 kilograms. In the Olympic final he faced the French defending champion Angelo Parisi and won Olympic gold for Japan in the heavyweight division again after twenty years.

In the final of the Judo World Championships 1985 in Seoul Saitō met the Korean Cho Yong-chul and had to give up after an arm injury. After winning the Asian Games in 1986, Saito injured himself in 1987 at the Japanese championships and missed the world championships. In 1988 Saitō won the Japanese championships against Naoya Ogawa , won his first championship title and qualified for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. There, Japan's participants won three bronze medals, but had not reached a final before the last day of the fight. In the semifinals Saito met Cho Yong-chul, whom he was able to beat this time. In the final he then defeated Henry Stöhr from the GDR. Two days after the Austrian middleweight Peter Seisenbacher , Saito was the second judoka to repeat his Olympic victory four years later.

After his career, Hitoshi Saitō was active as a trainer at his university and for the Japanese Judo Federation. Among other things, he looked after the Japanese team at the 2004 Olympic Games . He died on January 20, 2015 at the age of 54 in Osaka of complications from biliary tract cancer .

literature

• Volker Kluge : Summer Olympic Games. Chronicle IV. Seoul 1988 - Atlanta 1996. Sportverlag Berlin, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-328-00830-6 .

Web links

• Hitoshi Saito in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Hitoshi Saitō on Judoinside (English)
• Judo World Champion Open Class ( Memento from September 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
• Judo world heavyweight champion ( Memento from September 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Two-time Olympic judo champion Saito dies at age 54. Obituary on mainichi.jp from January 20, 2015 (English, accessed January 20, 2015).