Tristani Mosakhlishvili, better known as Tattoojust wanted to escape from the Champ de Mars arena in Paris. Her fellow judoka Ai Tsunoda put her legs together, crossed her arms and stood with Japanese discipline. But both said the same thing: “I made a mistake,” they admitted, heartbroken and like clones after both losing their bronze matches. It was the day of almost for the Spanish delegation, which did not fine-tune its shot and lost all its battles on the tatami.
“I don’t want to talk, please, I don’t want to. Let my coach speak,” Tato implored the Spanish Olympic Committee officials from the scaffolding of the venue. At first he was unable to get out, crouched down like a baby, and then he ran away. This 26-year-old Georgian, who reached the semi-finals in the -90kg category only to end up leaving empty-handed, didn’t know what to say or do. At the start of the day, the federation’s technicians were also unable to predict which Tristani would appear. As explosive as he is unpredictable, his performances often fluctuate between great results (world bronze last May) and others in which he is upside down. In the morning he performed like a genius, but in the afternoon he died on the shore. First with the Georgian Lasha Bekauri (gold) and then with the Greek Theodoros Tselidis.
“I am very disappointed. I am super happy to get this far, but I made a mistake. I had studied it well. [al heleno en la lucha por el bronce] and I knew what I was going to do. It was my mistake,” he admitted in the scant minute that, after many pleas, he agreed to speak with his chest exposed. Three hours earlier, happy to smell the medal, he had remembered his judoka grandfather and his family’s humble origins. “A time when the family had nothing. Not even 10 euros to buy the judogi [traje]”, he recalled in his acceptable Spanish, even though sometimes he doesn’t trust it very much.
The full stop on the shaved head
Tsunoda, more talkative, tried to explain what had happened to her. “I made a mistake that I sometimes make in training and I paid dearly for it,” she admitted. At her side, her mother Céline (French) explained that she fell into the trap of her rival, the Austrian Michaela Polleres, of taking the fight for bronze to the ground. After losing in the quarterfinals, she also did not hide that she had made a mistake. “I try to be realistic. If I don’t see things as they are, I can’t improve. I don’t think I attack myself. I am very optimistic, which is the problem sometimes. I have simply seen what happens,” said this 22-year-old, current European bronze medalist, born in Lleida to a Japanese father and a French mother.
Her shaved head makes her undisputed on the circuit. After the lockdown, in 2021, she lost twice in a row to an Italian and began to pass the buck, to justify herself, to say that she had no teammates to train with because of the pandemic. She called her father and he told her to watch the fights again and that they would talk. The problem was not the cobblestones, but her, who did not take responsibility. And what occurred to her to make a break was to shave her hair. She even asked her father, who also keeps her at zero, to do it, but he did not want to.
With her father, by the way, in February 2022, she was in Crimea when Russia invaded Ukraine. He was, and still is, the Russian coach, and was with the team at a training camp. But she has never given many details about that. They took a taxi and left there. Her mother, a woman who worked as a truck driver in Spain years ago from Sunday to Friday, is the one who accompanies her in competitions. She and her father (Go) are her coaches, an alliance that does not usually give great results on the mat, but which always offers exceptions like this one.
If Tsunoda had a hard time accepting the new pandemic scenario, Tato went to live for a few months at the home of his then coach, Quino Ruiz, who invited him and Niko Sherazadishvili to his home because there was more space there to practice judo. Both are of Georgian origin. Tato had arrived in Spain at the age of 20 due to the high competition in his native country. He first settled in Vigo and then went to Ruiz’s gym in Brunete (Madrid), until not long ago he moved to Valencia with Sugoi Uriarte, a move that has left some wounds between both sides.
In 2021, in Tokyo, when that change had not yet taken place, she travelled to Japan with Niko to help him train, and in 2022 she obtained Spanish nationality, just in time to start scoring points for Paris. Her Georgian judo – lots of hugs and lots of contact – came to nothing after smelling the big blow. Just like Ai Tsunoda. This Thursday, it is Sherazadishvili’s turn, the last (and great) chance to increase the judo medal tally.
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