- Let's throw a curveball at you first. Let's try a quick hypothetical question. 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 two guys, they're waiting outside, both are 73 kg players. They happen to be in the top 10 of the world.

One is Russian, the other is Japanese, and I'll give you one million dollars if you beat one of them in judo, in a judo match. Which one do you fight? - Oh, tough question. - A Russian or a Japanese, which one would you face? - I think I'd take my shot against the Russian.

- Oh wow. (laughs) - So the reason is, they're so much more technical. The Russians obviously have great judo, explosive power. Don't get me wrong, I mean, it's a tough decision either way, but when I look back at my statistics and which style of player I beat more often, I had more success against Russians than I did against Japanese.

- All right, that's the voice of Jimmy Pedro. I'm here at the Pedro Judo Center, talking with Jimmy, a legendary judo competitor and coach. He represented the United States at four Olympics, '92, '96, 2000, 2004, winning bronze at two of them. He medaled in three world championships, winning gold in '99.

He has coached many, if most, elite level American judoka, 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. Four of those people have been on this podcast. - Nice. - Your first judo coach was your dad, still your judo coach.

- Always will be. - Always will be. 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.

When I was a kid, judo was mandatory. There was no such thing as I don't wanna go to judo today. It was you're going to judo tonight, and it was every night. We only had practice when I was a little boy, three days a week, but I was at the dojo five, six 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, 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, build your character. - Yeah, many parents want their kids to eat vegetables because it's good for them and eat healthy 'cause it's what they want. My father wanted me to do judo 'cause 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.

So my father wasn't an Olympic champion. He wasn't a national hero. 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 'cause 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. So I'm a different father. 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 wanna play, what they wanna do. Right now, I have a son who's ranked number one in the nation in the sport of wrestling as a sophomore in high school.

He chose wrestling as a sport. 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? - Everybody's different.

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 'cause 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 wanna 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 I felt all that pressure from my father and I despised going to training sometimes or it was difficult. But as 15, 16, I was like, hey, I'm pretty damn good at this thing. I like winning and I like being around other athletes and I get to see the, 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?

You get to see the world. 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? - Then it really became, I was motivated. I was always a self-motivated kid anyway, but really when I was 15 to 16, I turned the corner and I decided that I was given 100% 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 gonna 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 two Olympic teams. And I went to Neil Adams in England and I learned from Neil and he 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 gonna send you away. "Don't just train, I want you to learn. "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.

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. I can tell you numerous times. When I was only 16 years old, I went to the US Open in judo. At the time it was one 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 as a young boy it was a super hard tournament to compete and I competed against all the men. 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?

But I threw him, I scored right away and then he just grabbed me and manhandled me across the match. He started shaking my gi and snapping my gi and I ended up getting three penalties and losing the fight. My father went nutso on me. He yelled and he screamed at me, he embarrassed me in front of everybody.

- What was your mistake in that match? - According to my father, I fought afraid. I was scared to lose but physically I couldn't match this guy. So anyway, long story short, I went out in the snow, took my gi off, laid down in Colorado Springs in the snow and just cried.

Just fought my heart out, fought like eight fights. I lost for a bronze medal at 16 years old in one of the toughest tournaments and I felt like a failure. My dad, and I felt like my dad hated me. And he embarrassed me in front of everybody so I wanted to quit.

I had another time, I was in Japan and I had spent six weeks training in Japan and I went to the Kano Cup. And the Kano Cup is one of the best tournaments in the world and at that tournament, I sucked a lot of weight after being in Japan for six weeks.

I sucked a ton of weight and I was all excited to fight. Well, my first round was against Sergei Kosminin. Kosminin was a Russian. First match of the tournament, Kosminin threw me free pwn. I had no idea who he was. I was all pissed off and upset. Kosminin then threw Nakamura free pwn.

And then so my, and Kosminin went on and he won the tournament, he took first. My second round was against Nakamura. He beat me by pwn. So I went 0-2 in the Kano Cup after being in Japan for six weeks, dieting and losing a lot of weight, made all this sacrifice.

I remember sitting on the steps at the Budokan at 19 years old thinking to myself, I hate this sport. I just wanna quit. This stinks. - So how do you find the will? Where do you find, how do you continue? Every champion wants to quit. I love that. That's brilliant, yeah.

You know, it's lost as part of 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 dark days. 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. It doesn't happen. 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? - Right. - 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. I wanted to be on the top of the world.

I wanted to be top of the podium. Worlds or Olympics, that was my goal. And quite honestly, that same guy, Kozminian, you know, 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 Sienni, and I beat him in that tournament.

So, you know, 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, you know, I played a lot of sports as a kid.

My dad allowed me. I played, you know, football, Papuan or football. I played baseball as a young kid. I wrestled in high school. I did judo. 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 gonna 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, you know, being in a bad situation. You get out of it what you put into it. 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 and I fought when I was six. So I fought six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. 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.

- You're scared of losing. - Right. - Basically. - 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. - Right. 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? - Absolutely. With 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.

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. So I think the lows end up being lower. 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.

That's a parallel path. Or like I said, education or work or something else to provide some sort of enjoyment. - So you don't think that's a negative distraction to that one singular focus towards the-- - I think there's certain times where obviously six months before the Olympic games, it's time to focus and put all your energy into sport.

Okay, so when I was at Brown, I took a break from Brown and I focused just on training in judo in the Olympics. But I had never really put my life on hold for sport. I had kids. Before I won the 99 worlds, I mean, I had two kids already and one 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 two and three 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. - So you medaled in '91 at the worlds and in 2004 at the Olympics and many times in between. So that's at least 13 years of being one of the best judo competitors in the world. So what would you attribute that longevity to?

For so long being at the top? - Well, like I said, I wanted to be the best in the world. So my motivation was to be world or Olympic champion. - There's an injury in there too. - There's a bad injury in there, yes. Well, and that also plays into every, you know, everything happens for a reason and everything plays into what you ultimately become.

My injury was pretty devastating. - 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, 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 didn't think anything of it. 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. And it was like that for quite a while. So obviously I went to the doctors. The 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." And I remember going, and I cried.

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 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 zero. 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. But it was miserable. I had about six months of living like that. - For how long did you believe this is it, that you're not doing judo ever again?

- The entire time I was injured and the pain, 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. So I knew it was serious. And I tell you, sometimes the only thing I could do was I would drink like eight or 10 beers to pass out.

I couldn't stand the pain. I couldn't move. I didn't sleep in a bed for that whole time. And then even when it started, I got lucky. I just kept taking anti-inflammatories. I kept doing the traction. 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 I can move my head now." And the guy was like, "You've made a lot of progress." And he said, "Okay, now still, I don't want you to run.

"You can't do judo, no wrestling." I said, "But I want you to go back in the weight room "and I want you to start retraining that muscle "and those muscles to move again." And I remember the first day on the Nautilus machine, no weight, there was no weight on the thing.

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 I would just keep trying to train my muscles to move. First time on the bench press, just the bar. I 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 would try to get that off. 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, "Started to train neck muscles and traps." And it came back and it took about nine months to be back strong enough where I could get back on the mat and start doing what you call me and start to train again.

- It's incredible. And then almost 10 years after that, right, the Olympics. - Yeah. - So how is the Jimmy Pedro of 1991 different from the one 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.

Just tough, just went after it. - Fast. - Yeah, not so explosive though 'cause I cut a lot of weight when I was younger. So I wasn't so explosive in '91. And my best years in the sport of judo were between '95 and '99 was when I was explosive, technical, really strong on the mat, physically real explosive.

My judo was real technical. Those were 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. And I think the Korean thought I won. In that year, the Japanese who won the world's three months later, I beat him pretty easily in Germany. So I thought I should have been world champion '95. And then two weeks before the '97 world championships, which I was undefeated like the whole year, winning everything.

Two weeks before I was supposed to go to world championships, I went to a training camp that the coach talked me into going to. And two of the heavyweights, one guy got thrown into my leg and he took my MCL. I had a second degree sprain of my MCL.

He just fell into it, but it swelled up. And it was only two weeks before I had to step on the mat at the world's. And that MCL couldn't heal in time. So I didn't actually fight in the '97 world championships as a result of that. But '99, I was 98, 99.

I don't think I lost maybe two, three times in that whole run. And really it was because I competed so many tournaments right in a row, one week after another week after another week, your body gets broken down. But then 2004, I retired after 2000 only because I told my family that, all right, this is the end of my run.

I'm supposed to win the Olympics. This will be my last Olympics. It's time to start life. My wife has sacrificed 12 years waiting for me to come home. And when I didn't win in Sydney, I started life. I started working and I just didn't want to go out as a loser, as somebody who didn't medal in the Olympics.

And I just couldn't accept it. So I was inspired at the 2002 Olympic games. And I was really inspired by that. And I said, Maria, I want to do this one more time. So she said, of course, I knew this was coming and by all means, let's do it.

And that was the most enjoyable two years of my life. From 2002 to 2004, I was in the finals of every single tournament. Every tournament I made the finals, all the way through, no matter what tournament it was. And I just enjoyed the life of an athlete again. And you can be selfish, you can focus on yourself, you can train, you feel great.

You never get that same feeling out of anything else in life as being a winner or a champion or having the crowd roar. And you don't get that from anything else. I'm in business and I can do some big deals, but it's still not that same feeling. - Yeah, it's all on you.

All eyes are on you. It's all up to you. - Right, it's awesome. And so I enjoyed that. And so as 2004 athlete, I was physically strong. I had the- - Great cardio. - I had great cardio. I was efficient with my muscles. I knew how to spend energy.

I wasn't as good of a judo player in 2004 as I was in '95 to '99, but good enough to win. - Do you think, to be poetic for a moment, do you think, like you said, with age, athletes lose the fearlessness of youth? How essential is that? That stupid, being brave and stupid and your singular focus on this just drive.

- Absolutely. You know, I think it's a good balance. It depends on how the athlete deals with the pressure. You know, going into the 19, going into the 2000 Olympics, I was '99 world champion. So all eyes were on me to win the gold, right? All the newspapers, all the magazines, everybody was talking about America's first ever gold.

So I had all that pressure on me. And it wasn't that the pressure got to me. It's just that first round, I had the Korean guy was top five guy in the world and he was always a tough match for me. So I just didn't, wasn't meant to be.

But going into 2004, I was old, I had experience, but I wanted it. I was hungry again. I wasn't afraid. I didn't have pressure. I couldn't wait to compete in 2004, you know? So I was older, but I had that hunger. And what happened was ironic with Kayla Harrison, you know, when she was world champion 2010, she tried to repeat in 2011.

Well, all you could see it in her training, you could see it in her competition, the pressure of trying to repeat as world champion was so great, she kind of cracked on, you know, she cracked on the pressure. She felt it similar to what I did in Sydney. You feel the pressure.

You don't, you're not sure if you're doing enough. You're not sure if you're ready. And probably the best thing that ever could have happened to her in 2011 was to lose and finish third. Because it set her up. And she wasn't the top dog going into London. She was one of the favorites, but she wasn't ranked number one.

She was number four. And she was an underdog. And she wanted to climb back on the top of the podium again. So she had, she was hungry again. Whereas if she had been a world champion in 2011, she would have never won the Olympics in 2012. Never would have happened.

- What, now you don't have to admit this, but have you ever been broken on the mat in competition? For whatever reason, you lost hope or confidence in the match. Has there ever been a guy tough enough to have broken you? - I've never been broken in a judo match and I've never quit, ever.

It's just not my mentality. I fought some guys that were tough as nails, you know, that I had to fight for my life against, but I never backed down, never backed down to anybody. I might've got beaten, but I went out fighting. - Never quit. - I never quit ever in a match.

- So maybe, can you think of anyone in particular who's the toughest guy who ever faced the competition for you personally? - I mean, I had so many tough, tough fights in judo competition. I mean, I had some real matches with Udo Qualmals, the German, he was two time world champion, Olympic champion, and Udo and I fought hard, you know, five, six times.

Those were wars that if it was golden score, we might still be fighting today. You know? And there was a Japanese guy, Nakamura, Yukimasa Nakamura, he was somebody I never beat in my career. Like I never beat that guy. He beat me in the semis of the junior worlds, he beat me in the semis of the senior worlds, beat me at the Kano Cup, he beat me in the finals of France.

I remember every loss. So he was just a very skillful, and you know, judo is a lot about matchups. If you don't match up well against somebody, then you know, you have a hard time beating them. But he was a guy I had a hard time beating. So, but I never backed down and I never, you know, nobody ever just ran over me.

- So I remember I talked to Taraji Williams and he said he was really depressed after his Olympic run, I think second. What is that life after the Olympics? Were you haunted by the losses? Is there a depression? Like you will never achieve this kind of high. What is that transition into normal life, into a life of a coach?

- It's really hard. And I can tell you, having been to four Olympics, they were all very different. My first Olympics that I lost, I won two matches, I lost my third. But the three guys that were on the podium were three guys that I had beaten. And I'd beat them many times.

So I felt as if I should have been there. And sitting in the stands with my father, I remember crying, thinking, I gave up my entire life. I sacrificed all those trainings in the gym and all that time overseas and away from home and missed parties and missed this and missed that.

And that's it? It's over? Like three matches, I'm done. I didn't do anything in the Olympics, I failed. I felt like crap. It was depressing. Luckily, I was young enough and stupid enough that I wanted to try again. - Go meet again, yeah. - Winning in Atlanta was fabulous.

Winning in America and walking around town and have everybody treat you like a hero and welcome you into their store or their restaurant or their bar or whatever it was and show your medal and take pictures. You were a rock star in Atlanta and it was awesome. But when you come home, you get tugged in a million directions by a million people that want your time.

So what ends up happening is you start doing everything for everybody else. Hey, can you show up to this kid's thing and talk at the school or can you come to this appearance and sign autographs? And you find that your time is all about giving other people your time and you don't really ultimately enjoy it anymore because you could see how sometimes stars just feel like they never have a sense of themselves.

- It's a curse of celebrity, really. - Right, you never have a sense for yourself or peace for yourself. When you never do anything for yourself, it's always about other people. So that becomes hard. But it comes with the, I'll take the win every day of the week over not, right?

So then Sydney was devastating. Losing in Sydney was the worst ever. It really was a dark-- - And you retired. - And I retired. So I felt like a failure and I felt like, fifth place in the Olympic Games for me was a total failure considering I was supposed to win the Olympics.

So that was a hard one to swallow and that's why I couldn't ever swallow it forever. I needed the fight again. But yeah, I could see how somebody like a Taraji who didn't medal in the Olympics, who pursued it as long as he did and made two Olympic teams, as great as everybody else sees that feat, as an athlete, when you have your sights set on achieving excellence and you don't, you definitely feel unfulfilled.

And you could see that, like I said, in sport, you really don't get that same sense of elation from anything else in life. I ran a marathon. And I ran the Boston Marathon one time. And when I got done, people were like, "Oh my God, that must have felt awesome." I said, "No, I couldn't wait to go home.

"I was tired. "I just wanted to lay down and eat." "Well, wasn't that the greatest feeling in your world?" I'm like, "No." "Would you do it again?" I said, "No, why would I do it again? "I already did it once." But most people, for them, it's such a massive accomplishment.

For me, it was just, "Okay, I did it. "I'm done, move on." Childbirth, I hear people say childbirth is awesome. And it is, it's different. It's a sense of, but it's a different feeling than what you get from winning. And the only thing that has ever come close to me doing it was when Kayla won.

It was being a part of something, and I believe that was destiny, that she came here for a specific purpose, some higher being stuck her in this dojo. And the reason why I didn't win in Sydney is 'cause that girl was supposed to win in London. And we were supposed to help her on that journey, my father and myself, that we were supposed to be a part of that.

And that was the magic moment. - It's an amazing chain of events that it feels like it leads up to, yeah, to-- - And to me, I believe in that destiny, and I believe in karma and good things, so. - And a repeat in 2016. - Let's hope, let's hope.

It's setting up nicely. - So in the United States, a country where judo has struggled to gain ground over the years, over wrestling, jujitsu, compared to other nations in the world, you have produced almost all, if not all, of the US medalists at Worlds and Olympics in the last two decades.

What is your secret? What is the system that you follow? Let's say, how do you take a six-year-old, maybe not a six-year-old, but let's say a six-year-old, with an interest in judo and give them a shot at the Olympics medal stand by the time they're 22? What is the process you follow to make so many champions?

- Well, first and foremost, there is a system. And that's the thing that most other places in America don't have. And that's really the problem with the entire USA judo, is that we don't have a system to produce high-level athletes. We've done it here in Boston. And I was part of this elite under-23 program where we took the 20 most talented kids in the country.

And of that crop came Marty Malloy, Travis Stevens, Kayla Harrison, Nick Del Popolo. They were part of that U23 program that I was a part of for six years. So that was also my system. And really, it's obviously, to be great, you gotta be willing to work, right? You have to be willing to put in the hours and you gotta be willing to take the punishment.

So it's a mentality. Number one, it's a championship mindset you have to have. Second, you gotta know how to train. And we believe in a system of conditioning. We believe in grip fighting. We believe in Newaza. And we're big into strategy. So we know that we cannot beat the Russians.

We cannot beat the French. We cannot beat the Brazilians. We cannot beat the Japanese by doing more judo than they do, because it's impossible. - Theoretically, yeah. - Right, we can't beat them with judo, 'cause they have way more people to train with, right? Way more opportunity. So we have to beat them with physicality, technical strategy, gripping, Newaza, conditioning, toughness, in a mindset that we're gonna win.

And this is how we're gonna win. And you gotta get your students to believe in that system that, okay, we're doing all, and the way we train, we train very intense. When I go to Russia or Japan, there's, well, two different things. Russia's a lot of drilling, a lot of technique, a lot of free motion and free feel, and not a lot of randori, right?

When you go to Japan, it's the opposite. It's all randori. - Really, randori heavy, wow. - They all do tons of, they do 15 rounds of randori a day in Japan. It's insane. In Russia, they're lucky if they do 15 in a month, right? It's 'cause it's very technical.

But two different schools of thought. We do really intense, focused training here. And we're smart with the periodization of our athletes. - Yeah, so you've mentioned that you believe in the idea of peak peaking. - Peak performance. - So what is, is it essential to cycle? - It is.

- Why can't you be your 100% year-round? - Because-- - Is it a mental aspect? - Physically, you can't be, and mentally, you can't be. You need to have times of relaxation, and you need to have times of focused training. And actually, as I tried to teach this just recently to my 16-year-old boy who was trying to be the best in wrestling.

I said, "Son, you can't go 365 days a year "banging your head against the wall and not enjoying life "because in the end, you'll be like this. "You'll be great, and you'll be here, "but you'll never have that performance of a lifetime "that you need to have, and you need to have this.

"You need to have the time where you're not at this level, "but you're at this level." Your body needs time to heal. Your muscles need time to heal and rest. Your mind needs time to heal and rest. In order to have, otherwise, it gets used to being, it gets used to being right here all the time in this zone.

We wanna have a zone where it's above that, and that's what's Olympic champion. That's what world champion is. But in order to have that, you gotta let your body come down so that it can build from somewhere. So you see that a lot, boxers are actually pretty good at that.

I mean, they take it to an extreme where they get so fat and so out of shape, then it's their training camp for 12 weeks or 16 weeks, right? But that's the idea is that I'm not training now. I'm relaxing, I'm having fun so that I can focus when it's time to focus and get real serious about this, and I can push my body to limits that I otherwise wouldn't.

And that's what we believe in. - You've mentioned your father, Jim Pager, Sr., is a big part of the club. What role does he play as part of the system? - He's a huge part of the system. You ask any of the athletes, he gives his time. I work full-time, I have four children.

So judo's never gonna make me rich. - Yes. - So my life as a judoka has helped me become pretty wealthy because of being involved in martial arts. So I'm able to, I just started a brand new mat company, the Fuji Mat Company, just started that. I've been involved in selling Fuji and Harashita sports goods for the last year or so.

So I've been able to make my life through martial arts and judo, but the sport of judo is not what puts food on my kid's table. So in order for these athletes to become great, they need to train more than once a day. So my dad is down here with the, every single morning he runs a morning technical training session for all of our elite guys.

- Yeah, can you actually describe, at least in broad strokes, what a weekly program looks like for an elite level judoka? - Sure. So our athletes train Monday, Monday morning they train here judo, technical session. It's about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes of technical training. - What do you mean by technical training?

So it's like drilling, throws, and narandori? - Sometimes, depends on how many bodies we have and depends on who's in town training. But for the most part, it's mostly drills, gripping drills, nawaza drills, throwing, throwing drills, three man uchi komis, speed drills, sprints in the morning at the end of practice, some conditioning.

But they're training for an hour to an hour and 15 minutes every morning. When they leave here, they then go to a professional strength coach. Some of them go to Mike Boyle's Strength and Conditioning in Woburn. Some of them go to the place I went with Paul Soussi, one-to-one strength training in North Andover.

But after they work out here, they have a break, they go eat, then mid-afternoon, they're at a strength training place. Judo-specific strength training. It's not power lifting, it's some type of circuit training. Again, it depends on what type of time of year it is and what phase of training we're in, what type of lifting they're doing.

So it depends. But they're doing something focused for, again, between an hour, an hour and a half with stretching and everything else built in, an hour, an hour and a half of afternoon. Then they come back at night and they'll train rendori at night. We do another hour and a half rendori session at night.

So they're minimally doing three trainings almost every day. They go Monday like that, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday, they have the morning off. So they just do weight training and judo. And then Friday morning only, they train. - And then Saturday, Sunday off? - Saturday depends on the weightlifting schedule they're on.

Like a Friday, they only have one training. And Saturday, they normally have one training, a weight training. But they get Saturday night off and Sunday off. - Beautiful, okay. - Unless we're fighting in a tournament, then they have to go to the tournament on the weekend. (laughing) - What has been the biggest challenge for you in preparing for the 2016 Olympics in Rio?

Preparing the team. - For me, personally, it's been balancing family with team. My wife's been at this for a long time, right? So she's been helping since 1992. She's been living with me going to the Olympics. So after the 2012 Olympics, it really took a hard toll on my family 'cause I had to travel so much.

So I took a break after 2012 and I've been home a lot and I've been focusing on the family. I have a daughter that's six. I have three teenagers that give mom hell at home when I'm away. So I've been really focusing on family. So that's why it's been hard for me to balance because I love judo, I love the sport, I love helping the athletes, I love being in the game.

And I genuinely feel that the athletes benefit with having me in their chair and with them and it inspires them and I think it gives them a lot of confidence. But so that's been the challenge for me is balancing both. But now that the Olympics is ramping up again here and we're just about to turn 2015, there's gonna be a lot more traveling to come in with the team.

But my dad's picked up, I've put my dad in that role because the best two athletes in our country are Kayla Harrison and Travis Stevens. So they're from our territory, they're from our home club. So my dad is their coach and I'm their coach. So if they can't have me, they have the next best thing and that's my dad.

- What is the most painful moment you remember, maybe one that stands out as a coach? - Watching Travis Stevens lose at the semifinal match at the Olympic Games unquestionably as a coach was the most painful moment I've ever been involved in because I see how hard the boy works.

I see how much he wants it. I see how much he sacrifices. He's a kid who doesn't drink alcohol. He's straight as an arrow. - Yeah. - And when I gave you that schedule of three times a day training, he's out there right now doing jujitsu. So he trains four to five times a day.

Like he's a mat rat. You know, he wants it. - And when he's hurt, he pushes through. - Yeah, he's a tough kid. So I felt really bad for him because you don't really get those moments back in life where you're in the semifinals of the Olympic Games. In fact, he may never get that moment back.

We hope he does, but that was flip of a coin who wins the fight. And if it goes his way, he's a silver medalist or a gold medalist in the Olympics. You know? So that was really painful. And I watched him cry on the sideline for an hour after that.

And then he had to fight for a bronze and normally nine times out of 10, he'll beat that Canadian. You know, he beat the boy before the Olympics many, many times. It's just, he had physically drained his body of all emotion. He had nothing left for the bronze fight.

So. - So you're a coach now, but you're also in forever judoka. So how's the Jimmy Pedro of today different from the guy who won bronze in 2004? In terms of how has your judo developed? How you think, technically, how you think about judo, how you approach judo? How you teach judo?

- Well, I try to, I take a lot of what I learned in my career and I pass it on to my students. Nobody ever, I really had nobody that gave that to me. - Right. - So there's a mental side of this game that I learned and I trained my mind.

I visualized success myself. I had some good self-talk that I did with myself all the time. I've passed all of that onto my students, how to use their mind to achieve success, how to see it, how to believe it. Even before they do it, they have to believe it and they have to see it.

And I'm a firm believer that if you create that pathway in your mind enough times, what happens is when the moment comes for it to happen, your body thinks it's been there before and that's where it's supposed to go. So it'll go. - Yeah. - And most people, they never see it happen.

They only, oh, I hope I wanna be an Olympic champion someday. But they never really see it, believe it, experience it before it happens and therefore it never will because they don't think it's possible. So I-- - Kayla talked about that that is something you taught her and then she just felt like at the Olympics, she felt like it's almost like you're an autopilot.

It's an obvious fact that she's getting the gold. She's almost walking through the-- - Right. - And she's visualized a million times. - So I was able to pass that on. And they say sports is like 90% mental, right? I mean, because if it was just training, everybody would train 365 days a year, right?

24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's it. It's just whoever trains the most, but it's not. We all do the physical stuff, but not everybody does that mental stuff. And I really, as a coach, focus on that side of the game as well as the strategy and looking at videos and studying how to beat this opponent and what our objectives are in this match.

And I think that also, rather than just walk out blindly and just fight, you've gotta have a strategy going in. So I think taking that professional approach to the game and with our system, if you look at the number of people we have in this dojo in terms of elite athletes and the number of bodies we have to train with, there's gotta be doing something right, right?

Because we're competing with Japan and Russia and France and everywhere else with what we have, and we don't have very much money either. So we're up against all odds, yet we're still getting it done. So I'd say, how is it different? I think I'm a little bit more cerebral as a coach than I was as an athlete, because I had to learn a lot of it on my own when I was a player.

- So last topic, one that gets a lot of talk, but in the last half decade, the IJF, the International Judo Federation, has made a lot of rule changes, starting from banning leg grabs. Can you summarize the rule changes and say whether you think they have had an overall positive or negative effect on judo?

- The IJF's goal was to differentiate judo from wrestling. They really wanted to differentiate the two sports so that in case the Olympic Committee said, "You know what, we need to get rid of another sport. "Which sport are we gonna get rid of?" Well, wrestling and judo are kind of the same.

They're very similar. Why don't we just get rid of one of them? So they really wanted to differentiate itself from wrestling. - That was before they threatened wrestling. - Before they almost chucked wrestling, right. So that was one reason. Second is they tried to make it a little bit more fan-friendly.

So, man, how much time is spent gripping and ripping and gripping? So they've taken a lot of the gripping rules out of the game and you're not allowed to break grips so many times anymore. And they thought that was a boring element of judo. But the reality of the situation is that judo's never going to be a fan-friendly live sport.

It just isn't. It's never gonna be. And if you're not a judoka and you don't have an interest in who's fighting, it's boring. Judo can be very spectacular if you create a story behind it and you do a one-hour show where you're only showing highlights of, and behind the scenes, and who is this athlete, and get to know him, and get the people to know who he is, and then show his series of fights, and show his throws or submissions, and pump him up to watch the final.

And then when the final happens, just show the best clips of the final and have some commentary going about what's going on. Then it can be a good sport. But it'll never be a good live sport because it's very boring. And it always will be. No matter what rules you put in.

I love wrestling. But wrestling, if you don't know who is wrestling, it's boring. - Yeah. - You don't, and it's, and same with-- - Especially at the elite level. - Same with American football, though. If you truly, all the Europeans say, "Football's so boring. "You start, you stop, you start, you stop.

"I don't get it." And because they don't have an interest in any team, they don't care who wins. They're not from New England rooting for the Patriots. Say, when we watch soccer as Americans, it's boring. We're not rooting for any team. - So it's really the story that people fall in love with in football and everything.

- Or it's the team. - Like, yeah, they know the players. They know, they have a close connection with the people. - You gotta be into the game to enjoy it. So no fan who has never done judo is ever going to enjoy watching judo, unless it's a highlight reel and they're like, "Oh, geez, oh." And they see the cool stuff going on.

So I think all the rule changes are for not. I don't think they're affecting, they're not gonna affect the popularity of the sport. Unquestionably, they're not gonna affect. I go to all of these big Grand Slam tournaments in Abu Dhabi and there's nobody in the stands. You go to all these tournaments and there's nobody watching.

Everybody's watching online, but nobody's watching. So I think the rule changes, to be honest with you, I think it's gotten more towards sport. It's less towards, if you think about what judo was founded on, it was founded on sport, the Olympic sport. It was founded on self-defense, right? As an element of the sport.

Judo has no self-defense element whatsoever anymore. It's all about sport. No dojos really teach self-defense element of judo. And what are leg grabs? Really, leg grabs are self-defense. If some guy attacks me with his legs, I'm grabbing his leg, right? So they've taken that out of it. And even as a judo player who's in the sport, some guy who's very six foot one, and I'm five foot five, he's got really long legs.

So if he comes in high, I should be able to grab it. So you're taking that part of the sport, so I disagree with that. And then the kata, the prearranged movements. Nobody does that anymore, really, anyway. So judo's lost a lot of its, well, it's basically come down to just being an Olympic sport these days, which is impractical for the masses because the masses are never gonna compete in the sport.

It's too dangerous. It's too physical. So if you, like jujitsu succeeded because it's taken it to a safe place. It's taken it to the ground. Nobody's tumbling and falling and doing 360s, and they're rolling. They're getting a good workout. They're learning some self-defense, right? You can be 80 years old and-- But it's safe, right?

But that's okay. That's what, if you wanna make the sport popular, everybody has to be able to do it. And right now, judo has become a sport that only the young can do. That's why I think it's failing. - The question is, judo got into the Olympics in '64, 1964.

That's exactly 50 years ago. So martial arts in general have gone a long way in the last 50 years, thanks to the Olympics. And even, I think very importantly, thanks to mixed martial arts, where they kind of put like sumo and karate and all of these things together. And you realize that the grappling arts have a lot to contribute to.

This is a really effective art, an exciting art. So where do you think judo will be, this is a weird question, but 50 years from now? So do you think there's something timeless in terms of value in the sport of judo? - Judo's trying to become more professional, right?

But it's also becoming a very expensive sport. So what I see happening over the course of time is all of the big programs are gonna continue to be big in the sport of judo because they're invested-- - Across the world. - Yes. So only the big programs though. So what's gonna happen is, like right now, they have a cadet circuit.

So kids 14 to 18 years old, they can get on a world ranking list and there's a cadet circuit that they compete against other cadets. Then there's a junior circuit, that's up to 21 years old and all these juniors have world rankings and there's a junior competitions all over the world to develop those athletes.

And then there's a senior circuit. The problem is the big countries, like a Japan and a Brazil and a France and a Russia, in a lot of the European countries, they have the budgets and they're investing in their youth to ultimately run from cadet to junior to senior. So they're gonna continue to flourish as countries and get stronger and invest more money and grow.

All of the other countries, including America, who don't have money, we don't invest any money right now at all in our junior program. Not even, forget our cadets. Our cadets, their parents have to pay US judo just to have their kids do judo. But we invest nothing in our juniors 'cause we don't have the budget for it.

So all we focus on is the elite side and it's becoming more and more expensive to fund these athletes to qualify for the Olympics. Soon as you shut off that opportunity for us to qualify for the Olympics, judo's gone in America. It'll be non-existent. Okay, so and that's the direction we're headed.

We have less elite athletes today in America than we did four years ago, than we did eight years ago, than we did back in the '70s. There's less elite players today than there was then. So judo continues to shrink. The more expensive it becomes, I don't even see countries like Peru and a lot of the South American countries, Argentina, Venezuela, they used to have good full teams of athletes.

Nowadays, the number of athletes that are competing at the World's and Olympics, they're less and less and less and less. They have less money to do it. They have no budgets. They're gonna disappear. So what judo's gonna become, it's gonna become a much smaller sport in terms of number of countries that participate because there's not gonna be any programs in any of those other countries that can compete with the rest of the world.

So 50 years from now, I don't think you'll see, I don't think you'll see anybody from the United States. - There always could be some renegade club from Boston that proves everybody wrong. - I'm gonna tell you, mark my words right now, that if there isn't a drastic change in this country.

- Or funding from-- - That come the 2020 Olympic game, you'll be lucky to see two Americans on that team. Two. We get one guaranteed 'cause the IJF will give you one. But you'll be lucky to see two in Tokyo, the direction we're headed. 'Cause you're gonna lose, Travis.

You're gonna lose, Marty. You're gonna lose, Kayla. You're gonna lose, Nick. You're gonna lose all your best athletes right now. And I really don't see the pipeline coming up. - I hope that doesn't come to reality, but. - Me either. - On that dark note, people can find you on jimmypedra.com, on Facebook, where else?

- I'm a vice president and a partner in Fuji Sports and the Fuji Mac company. So we love your business and love your support. We deck out clubs with complete outfitting, their gyms with mats and wall pads and all kinds of gear. And then obviously the gi and gear.

We do custom uniforms for gis and shorts and rash guards and stuff for clubs at fujisports.com. - That's the only gi I own is Fuji gis. Like I'm moving to California now. I have a closet full of like 20 gis I have to figure out what to do with them.

But. - Before we end, I'd like to comment, Lex, that I've done considerable amount of interviews in my day. And through the years, I will say that this is the most well thought out, comprehensive, intelligent, thought provoking questions that I've ever been asked in my career. - Thanks, I appreciate that.

So I won't, since you said that, I will not hold your comment in the beginning about you choosing the Russian against you. So thank you very much for the warm welcome. It's been fun. Next time I'll come on by Gian. - Awesome, you're welcome anytime.