Meet The Team – Colin Oates

Colin Oates goes into the 2015 World Judo Championships off the back of some strong results including silver at the Baku Grand Slam and seventh at the IJF Masters in Morocco. The Harold Wood born judoka finished outside the medals at London 2012 and knows a good showing in Astana will help him on the road to Rio in 2016.

Category: -66kg

Current WRL: 7^th (1278 points)

Current OGQP: 11^th (462 points)

Fighting on: Tuesday 25^th August

Career Highlights: Baku Grand Slam Gold (2014), European Championships Bronze (2011), Olympic Games 7^th (2012)

2015 Highlights: Baku Grand Slam Silver, Morocco Masters 7^th

2014 World Judo Championship Medallists:

GOLD: Masashi Ebinuma (JPN) SILVER: Mikhail Pulyaev (RUS) BRONZE: Georgii Zantaraia (UKR) Kamal Khan-Magomedov (RUS)

“It’s going to be interesting, never been to Kazakhstan before so straight away that’s going to be an interesting experience and I think now it’s my seventh World Championships so it’s a long line of World Championships. I’ve had one decent result recording fifth but not good enough and it’s coming towards the later years of my career so it’ll be nice to try and be there looking to take a medal.

“There’s a lot of experienced players in the team; Gemma, Sally have been to quite a lot of world championships with me and I don’t think this is anybody’s first World Championships other than Ben Fletcher but other than that we’ve got quite a lot of experience so we try and help each other as a team. That’s kind of the main focus so as long as we come together like that then hopefully we can come away with medals because it’s been a long time.”

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