With Japan's Naohisa Takato celebrating his 33rd birthday recently, we look back at his remarkable career.
He showed his great potential from early on, winning the World Cadet Championships in 2009.
Two years later, in 2011, he became World Junior Champion.
Some judokas who did well in the juniors never successfully make the jump to seniors. But Takato did so with aplomb. In his first World Senior Championships in 2013, he won gold.
He seemed unbeatable. But then he suffered some setbacks for the next few years. In 2014 he lost in the World Championships to Russia's Beslan Mudranov through a penalty incurred for stepping out.
In 2015, his teammate Toru Shishime was the representative for the World's.
At the 2016 Olympics, he lost in the quarterfinal.
After three years of no major wins, Takato bounced back and won the 2017 World's. The following year, in 2018, he won his third World title.
But just as it seemed like he was once again an unbeatable force, Takato stumbled in the 2019 World's where he failed to get a medal.
He more than made up for it at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, where he won the gold medal.
He followed that up with his fourth World title in 2022.
Takato tried for a fifth but at the 2023 World's he failed to get a medal. He retired later in the year when he lost in the final of the Tokyo Grand Slam to his teammate and rival, Ryuju Nagayama.
His was a career with ups and downs, but Takato had many more ups than downs. Besides his Olympic gold and four world titles (six, if you count Junior World's and Cadet World's), Takato also has a whopping 16 gold medals from the IJF World Tour. That's a track record that's impressive by any measure.
