Edwards’ golden return
Glasgow 2014 silver winner goes one better at European Open, despite spending much of the year sidelined after concussion. Stewart Fisher reports from the Emirates Arena
THE closest most Scottish children of the 1980s came to an intimate knowledge of martial arts was repeated viewings of the Karate Kid, but judo took something of a hold on the country’s sports fans at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and has no intentions of letting it go.
The discipline has been omitted from the roster of sports for the 2018 games at the Gold Coast and the top Scottish judoka are being encouraged to train south of the Border. However, for the fourth successive year, the Emirates Arena rolled out the welcome mat to the European Judo Open. An increased crowd of about 2,000 people made it along for the event, which is the martial arts equivalent of one of the smaller ATP Masters tour events in tennis.
While Sally Conway, the Bristolian Scot who built on her Commonwealth bronze medal in Glasgow by becoming Team GB’s only Olympic medal-winning judoka in Rio de Janeiro, was excused the event as she travels to Naples for a holiday, one 2014 star was welcomed back – Stephanie Inglis. The Commonwealth Games bronze medallist, who spent three weeks in an induced coma in Vietnamafter a motorbike accident, hasn’t yet given up on a return to competitive action and attended the event with her family.
A podium place at the European event in Glasgow might not be quite as illustrious an Olympic medal in Rio but home medallists yesterday had every reason to feel chuffed with their afternoon’s work. Not least of these was Kelly Edwards, 25, from Shropshire who will soon have as much claim as Conway to honorary Scot status.
Not only did she previously train at the high-performance centre in Ratho, she will marry a Scotsman, Allan McDonald, at Carlowrie Castle in West Lothian next September.
Edwards had to settle for silver behind home favourite Louise Renicks in the under-52kg category at Glasgow 2014 but the impressive nature of her maiden European Open success was only underlined when you consider what she has been through this year.
The victim of four early-season concussions Edwards was taken out of the firing line for six months, a sufficiently long lay-off to put her out of contention for a Rio place. She has cast all before her since being given the green light to resume, and pays credit to an altered approach to her sport.
“It is my first European Open so it is nice for it to be here,” said Edwards, who competed at London 2012 and seems likely to feature in Tokyo in 2020. “I have a lot of friends in Scotland, up at Ratho where I used to train, so this does feel like home in a way to me.
“My year didn’t start so well but just to be able to train and compete at a high level means so much to me because there was a point where I didn’t know whether I would be able to do it.
“I didn’t know very much about concussion before. The first time I thought it was jet lag and just got on with it. But the symptoms didn’t go away so I knew something was up. It has definitely raised my awareness. I love my sport but there is also a life after it. Allan kept me going right through that time. It has made me put more in every day and concentrate on really enjoying it, because you don’t know when is going to be the last time.”
Lucy Renshall in the under-63kg category, and Katie Jemima YatesBrown in the under-70kg, were other UK winners, but 12 months after Scotland’s Stuart McWatt announced himself to the world with a surprise bronze medal here yesterday it was the turn of Glasgow’s Neil MacDonald to find himself on the rostrum.
Cruciate ligament injuries in both knees stopped McWatt competing this year but MacDonald, who won silver at the European Junior Championships in Malaga last month, took senior bronze, winning by way of Ippon against Philip Graf of Germany, who earlier conquered MacDonald’s countryman Scott Thomson. It was an impressive showing from MacDonald, not least because he admits that he also has to battle his nerves as well as his opponent.
Like Conway, he trains in Walsall rather than Ratho these days, where his progress was aided by rubbing shoulders with Team GB’s Ashley McKenzie. He hopes the rest of the Scottish-based fighters will join him in the Midlands this year, even if a mass exodus could cast doubt on the viability of the Ratho facility.
While omitted from the Gold Coast, judo has provisionally been included on the list of sports for the troubled 2022 games in Durban. “Before the Olympics, a lot of the GB judo team were down in Walsall training and we were there to push them as hard as we can,” MacDonald said. “I’m not that far off them now. I trained at Ratho when I was younger but hopefully next year everyone is going to come, they are going to centralise it.”
Elsewhere, among the Scots, Edinburgh duo Cailin Calder and Jonathan Dewar won one contest but couldn’t ultimately progress, Ullapool teenager Malin Wilson finished seventh in the under-57kg category, and Michelle Boyle, a winner at the 2011 International Children’s Games (ICG) in Lanarkshire, lost out on the chance to compete for bronze in the over-78kg group.
I concentrate on really enjoying my sport now. You don’t know when it’s going to be the last time