Yamini Maurya of Madhya Pradesh won a gold at 36th National Games in the women’s 57 kg category. She proved that at least there is no judoka to beat her at the national level. In the final at the Mahatma Mandir convention center, she defeated Savitri of Haryana and proved her supremacy. She said that winning gold was definitely her goal but she was not hoping that she would face so many one-sided bouts.
Yamini won the gold in the National Championship in Lucknow recently. She gave full credit to her hard work and her foreign and Indian coaches.
Yamini Maurya said, “Jeevan sir worked hard. We used to work a lot on different techniques. Both of these coaches made me psychologically strong to prepare for the competitions.”
Yamini said that her next target is to win a medal in Asian Games and then she would start thinking about her ultimate goal of winning an Olympic medal. She said that she would work hard and try to participate in tournaments as much as possible.
For the past few months, she was sweating it out only for the sake of success. She insisted that for all this she had to participate in international competitions under the guidance of her able coaches. She said that she learnt a lot from her mistakes.
Yamini laid emphasis that the exposure should be continued even if the performance was mediocre and at this level, winning or losing didn’t matter much. Yamini has achieved so far at the junior level only in international arena.
She has won bronze medals in Asian cadet and junior competitions. Her confidence after winning the gold at Commonwealth Junior Championship has increased a lot. Yamini said that in fact at the junior level she used more power like the other junior level judokas but when we become senior, we realise that at this stage power is just a part of our tactics and the complete game is more important at this level.
Yamini said that when she used to practice in Indore at the junior level, her success was limited to the bronze medal only but when she practiced in Bhopal for four years, she was totally changed, gaining her confidence which would make her national champion.
There are only a few Olympians in the country in judo. The defeat of Garima Srivastava was a big upset of the day. Garima had won gold at the Commonwealth Championships in Birmingham a few years back but today she was first defeated by Manipur’s Inunganbit and then for the bronze medal bout she lost to Ravneet Kaur. Inunganbit had also defeated her in the National Championship in Lucknow.
