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As a teen, Rena Glickman was ignored by her parents and wandered around Coney Island, N.Y., carrying a bayonet and "looking for trouble". Then someone on the street taught her judo, which, she said, saved her life. When her local YMCA group went to the New York state judo competition, she cut her hair short, bound her chest, and competed. She won, and as she stood on the podium to receive her gold medal, an official asked if she was a woman. Females were not barred from competition; she said yes -- and they threw her out. It was 1959. The experience "instilled a feeling in me that no woman should have to go through this again," she said, and she fought back by working to get women's judo recognized as an Olympic sport. She mortgaged her own home to finance the first-ever women's judo world championships in New York in 1980. Women's judo was an Olympics exhibition sport in 1984, and became a recognized medal sport in 1988; Kanokogi was the coach for the U.S. team. Last year Japan honored her with the Order of the Rising Sun, the country's highest honor for a foreigner, and in 2008 Kanokogi, a seventh-degree black belt (and the first woman to ever reach that level), was presented with a YMCA gold medal -- by the Brooklyn YMCA. Rena "Rusty" Kanokogi died November 21 from leukemia. She was 74.
From This is True for 22 November 2009
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