“I’m back. With a little one. Very nice.” Kim Polling can smile again. Of course she was able to do that after the birth of her daughter Aurora last May, but now also as a judoka. Because she will be back on the mat next weekend at the Grand Slam tournament in Abu Dhabi.

A year and a half ago it didn’t look like it at all. To her anger and frustration, Polling was not selected for the Tokyo Olympics later that year, having already decided to end her life as a top athlete after that event.

“I thought: I don’t want to end up like this,” she goes back to this moment, “but I’d rather be a mother.”

“Can you do both?”

Her Italian friend Andrea – the couple lives in Turin – had already retired from his judo career. “We really wanted children. If you get the guarantee that you can still have children when you are old and that everything goes well… But then you don’t have that guarantee and I turned thirty.” And then Andrea said quite simply: You can do both, right?”

Both: becoming a mother and prolonging the judoka existence, hopefully with a more suitable final chord. The mental turnaround lasted two months. “It was pretty tough. Missing the games was something intense and I had decided to quit. But I didn’t want to quit like that either.”

cleared

It was also problematic that Polling had lost confidence in the judo association after the Olympic starting permit had wrongly not gone to her but to her competitor Sanne van Dijke. Incidentally, he won an impressive bronze medal in the class up to 70 kilograms in Tokyo. But that aside.

Her former coach Marjolein van Unen helped her talk to the union. With results. “I don’t think trust in the federation will ever fully return, but things have cleared up regarding the games. And the qualification process for the next games has completely changed.

Because that bothered Polling, who lost in the first round in Rio in 2016 against the later Olympic champion Haruka Tachimoto, last year: “I wasn’t selected for Tokyo according to subjective criteria and not according to the race results. That was very difficult to say. Many of those involved from last year have since left the club. That also makes a difference for me.”

In consultation with their trainer Maarten Arens, they decided to go with a breath of fresh air and with it a new man at the top. “That became Garmt Zijlstra. New coach, new technical director, I’m a mother. It really feels like a new chapter. Very beautiful.”

Until her 35th

Also a great chapter. Instead of retiring, Polling is now – according to the plan – until her 35th judoka. “I was able to continue training in the first months of pregnancy, of course no judo adapted. I was terrified for my back because I had a hernia. But I had no problems with that. So the pregnancy went very well.” After all the injuries of the last few years, I was able to regain confidence in my body.”

At the end of June, five weeks after the birth, the new mother was back on the tatami. “My back and stomach are not as strong as they used to be, but are strong enough for judo. My goal is Paris in February 2023,” the four-time European champion refers to the Grand Slam tournament in the French capital. “Then I want to be at the top again, at my level.

Starting next weekend in Abu Dhabi. “I’m not going there to lose. Of course I’m going for the prizes. That would be a reward for the work. But I have no idea how realistic that is. I’m particularly excited to see how it will go. Nice.” get back on the competition mat and hopefully it lasts longer than a game.”