Twelve people signed up and prepared to get out of bed at 5AM on a Saturday, it looked like we would be able to field a good team and a bunch of individuals…until we found out on Friday night that the Student Union minibus had broken down. Being only left with five spaces in Matt’s car, the team was greatly decimated. Apologies to everyone who couldn’t go! We will stay away from that bus from now on… I guess we finally found out why it is so cheap.

At Warwick, Cambridge was represented by Alexander Barns-Graham and Tobias Schmidutz in the high grades category. Both weighed in at -73kg, so Tobias had to move up one category. The duo was reinforced by a -66kg reserve player, but the 3 of them played against other teams of 5, so they didn’t get very far. However, they did get some points that moved them closer to their dan grades.

However, the novices and intermediate fared much better. Andrew Tam gave a great performance in the intermediate -73kg category and won himself a bronze medal. In the process he produced an outstanding Ippon Drop-Seoinage and also beat his Oxford rival in his final match of the day.

Mikolaj Chadzynski dominated his pool in the -81kg novice group and won all his fights without major difficulties to take the gold medal.

Matthew Ives weighed in to the novice -100kg category, but joined the over 100kgs as well to get more fights. He annihilated all his opponents with Ippons, winning two gold medals in one day. It was a pity he wasn’t allowed to enter the intermediate heavy weight category as well, since 2 golds wasn’t enough for Big Matt. Especially noteworthy was his huge Ippon Tomoe Nage on former club member Alex who had run over to Oxford. Looking forward to seeing this again at Varsity!

Well done to all who fought! Thanks to Alec and Nick for their coaching!

Toby Schmidutz  – Men’s Captain