"We are very humbled that the President of the IJF has got the confidence in us, Southern Africa, to actually launch this pilot project here," said Estony Hattingh, President of the Southern African Judo Confederation and the Botswana Judo Federation.

"We're a strong team; we've got very strong and good countries in our area and I think that if this project is successful then the IJF can take it all over and the can develop and work on it from there.

"But from us at the SAJC [Southern African Judo Confederation] it is humbling and an honour."

A gold medallist in the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, Van de Walle later founded the Resourcement Centre which uses the concepts of unity of the mind, body and skills to help participants develop awareness of the way their mental attitudes influence their behaviours, practises and social interactions.

As an ambassador for the IJF, he and Alain Massart, a professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal who has worked alongside Van de Walle throughout his team-building formations, have worked closely with the IJF to collaborate with their experts and provide concrete and useful skills that can be shared with judo's National Federations across the world, in order to achieve the sport and educational objectives of judo.

Robert Van de Walle used judo, and the mentalities and values learnt whilst practising judo, to give an insight into how to grow towards mastery and leadership ©ITG


This inaugural development project brought together the 10 National Federations that make up the SAJC in order to pilot the scheme and provide the Presidents, secretary generals and coaches of each Federation with the knowledge and skills that they need to push forward as an organisation and grow judo within their country.

"As you have seen the project includes four modules on how to improve judo in different areas," said IJF sports director, Daniel Lascau.

"One of the areas, led today and tomorrow by Robert, was to try to introduce general knowledge and to use it as a metaphor on how to lead a judo federation.

"The third module will be done by Andrei [Bondor] which is speaking about organisations.

"On how to build an organisation, how to build a federation and how a federation gets functional.

"I have the last module which concentrates on the organisation of events."

He added: "The IJF sends a high level of staff here.

"We send competence in the regime and we hope that all the ethos and knowledge we hand over here will cascade into the federations.

"This project, which is now a pilot project, we have to have the feedback from the federations, we have to analyse the seminar and this workshop and I can imagine that if we are successful here we are confident to go into different regions and really support and improve these."

The first day of the project, led today by Van de Walle and Massart, focused on organisational excellence.

Van de Walle talked of the "path of mastery" that one must go on in order to find this excellence.

He used judo as the focal point of the seminar and his experience as an Olympic champion.

This famous phrase by Mahatma Ghandi - "if it has to be, it starts with me" - was used throughout the workshop, enveloping everything Van de Walle was trying to put across to the Federation delegates.

The Opening Ceremony of the IJF Development Project inside the Youth Olympic Development Centre in Lusaka, Zambia ©ITG



After the initial seminar, which looked in depth at this area of personal growth and how one must stick to the "path of master" in order to become a champion, an official Opening Ceremony saw the IJF delegation of Lascau, Van de Walle, Massart and Andrei Bondor, as well as the delegates from each Southern African Judo Federation, joined by the deputy minister of sport of Zambia and an ambassador from Japan.

The delegates were then invited to don their judogi as the workshop moved to the tatami for a more hands-on approach to development.

Here, Van de Walle used judo techniques, mentalities and attitudes to explain the correlation they have with other problems and situations throughout the world.

In an exercise using large puzzle pieces to make a square, Van de Walle showed the adaptions and changes one has to make in order to grow and excel in all areas of life and to find a solution to each problem as it comes.

As more pieces were added to the puzzle, he showed how it became harder to find a solution and how unity and team-work can be used as a means to finding this solution, with mentalities learnt while practising judo helping to form a strong mind, and a strong will, which pushed someone to succeed.

Robert Van de Walle used the square puzzle to show how adding extra pieces to a situation can make it more difficult, making it necessary to adapt and grow in order to find the solution ©ITG





Talking to insidethegames after the opening workshop, Hattingh talked of how she now hopes each delegate will travel back to their country and share the knowledge they have gained today with the rest of their federation, in order to make sure changes are implemented that can help judo grow in the southern African countries.

"I think it was brilliant," she added.

"It's the first time I've been part of this process.

"To present a 'boring' topic which is really about management, how to manage people...to make it interesting and to include judo from a different aspect, it was great.

"And I think it was a learning process for us because when we go back home we have to implement what we've learnt today.

"And that is the main objective, not just to get the knowledge here and keep it to ourselves, but we go back and part of our monitoring and evaluation process is for the different federations to let us know we've presented this, we've given this back to our federations.

"Robert is an Olympic champion, as a presenter he is also an Olympic champion."

The workshop continues tomorrow, where Van de Walle and Massart will cover the topic of "judo knowledge", again using the tatami to demonstrate how judo, its values and its ethos, can help develop a person and allow them to find the best solution to any problem put in front of them.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]