Fighting Against Shadows
for an Olympic Dream
'It's hard,' said Grace Ohashi about her visual impairment. 'Judo is everything for me. I won't quit until I get old.'
Atop a mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro last month Grace Ohashi came face-to-face with her redeemer. It was her first time in Brazil, so like many other tourists she snapped pictures of herself with her friends in front of the famous statue. But Grace, 18, wasn't there just for leisure. She was there to represent the United States in the Pan American Games in judo.
It was the first time the Fukushima, Japan-born athlete competed with the U.S. team so she soaked up the entire experience.
"It was cool," said Grace to the Pacific Citizen by phone from her Colorado Springs apartment two weeks after she returned from the competition. "We went to see Jesus Christ ... If I could see it more, it would [have] been more cool."
Then it becomes all too clear - the nationally ranked judo athlete is nearly blind. She's always had vision problems since she was a baby, but starting in May her eyesight started deteriorating more and more each day. One morning she woke up and her world was a fuzzy cloud.
"Right now in my left eye, I cannot see nothing."
A Black Belt in One Week
Grace has come too far to let a little setback like vision impairment hold her back. She came to the U.S. - her mother's country - six months ago to be a champion. She is ranked third nationally among her sighted competitors.
At the Pan American Games Grace forced Melissa Rodriguez, the 2006 Pan Am silver medalist, into two penalties and threw her for a koka (a small point). But Grace was ultimately thrown and eliminated from the tournament.
Her reaction drips with competitive spirit: "When I was fighting, I almost threw her. It was a matter of a few steps."
It was a spirit that manifested itself early.
Grace is the middle daughter of ministers Pat and Tomio Ohashi who met and fell in love at a sushi store in Fukushima. In junior high school, the Ohashi family moved to the Tochigi Prefecture, where her teacher Makoto Takaku noticed Grace playing basketball and told her she would be good at judo.
In the sport of judo, matches are won by knocking your opponent over, holding your opponent on his/her back for 25 seconds or administering some variations of choke holds and arm locks until your opponent begs for mercy.
So Grace gave judo a try. At 15, she earned a black belt by winning five matches - in a week. When she told Takaku about her achievement, he marveled that it was perhaps the fastest black belt achievement in Japan's history.
"That's when I was thinking maybe I'm good at judo."
She transferred to another school in Japan that had a stronger emphasis on judo and practiced up to five hours daily while maintaining perfect grades.
All the while, she yearned to move to the U.S. to learn English and chase her Olympic dreams. She e-mailed Eddie Liddie of USA Judo expressing her wishes to compete on his team.
"We get a lot of those e-mails," said Liddie, adding a lot of times they don't pan out. "Grace was a little more persistent. She wrote again and again. And she had good questions."
Seeing Shadows
In six months, Grace has adjusted to American life while training at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and majoring in social work at Pikes Peak Community College. She has her own MySpace page where she lists Disney movies and all books except for schoolbooks as some of her interests. She also wants to help orphans, but only after winning an Olympic Gold Medal, of course.
Some say judo is one of the few competitive sports that the visually impaired athlete can participate in fully. Australia's Anthony Clarke battled back from a car accident that blinded him to be ranked top 10 among judo athletes in the world.
Judo requires the least amount of rules adaptation for a visually impaired athlete to compete against a sighted one. Sometimes, the chance to be on equal grounds with a sighted person gives the athlete the extra confidence to excel, said Neil Ohlenkamp, a sixth degree black belt in judo and head instructor of the Encino Judo Club.
For Grace, the worst part is the unknown - the reason for her vision loss remains a mystery. In Japan, she didn't go to an eye doctor often. Now, she has to go regularly for tests, poking and prodding.
"I want to know what is going on. Maybe it can help me get my eyesight back," she said. "Right now, I can see red colors because it's bright. I can see shadows."
One time she fell from a flight of stairs and broke her arm. Another time, she was crossing a street without a traffic light and almost got hit by oncoming traffic.
"You'd see her squinting," said Liddie. "It's progressively gotten worse. I've seen her walk into a water cooler. We don't allow her to do anything without one of the athletes by her side."
But Grace isn't relying on other people's help. On the mat, she's adapted to her impairment.
"First, I hear the breath and I figure where the person is. Then I grab and don't let go," she said. "After I started competing I forgot about my eyes."
Liddie and Grace have worked out a system during competitions to help Grace dominate her opponent - he shouts out visual cues. If she's backing up against the line and about to cross over and get penalized, he yells out her location. He yells out the time on the clock and the numbers on the scoreboard.
"I become her eyes," he said.
But the question remains: will Grace be able to realize her dream of competing in the Olympics?
"She's moving along the right path," said Liddie. "If I had 20 athletes like her I would be lucky."
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