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Randall heads for mat finish in Sydney

Randall hoists the flag in triumph after he won the world light-middleweight title last October
©Allsport

Unless you had met Graeme Randall, you might feel uneasy knowing that Great Britain's first men's world judo champion in almost 20 years has recently been reading The Bone Collector - the story of a psychopathic killer, as if you couldn't guess.

Yet rarely do we fit the profile of characters from the books that we read and, if undoubtedly ruthless on the mat, away from competition Randall is as personable a leading international sportsman as you could wish to meet, though he does tend towards the dismemberment of bodily parts in his use of imagery.

"I would go home at night, broken bits hanging off me," Randall said, recalling his harsh upbringing in the sport, though one that he is thankful for now. "Everyone wants a piece of the champion," he added, explaining why he shunned Europe last month to train in Japan. Make no bones about it, there are limits to how tough a world judo champion can be. In Japan, Randall felt, well ...safe.

"It can be a lonely place at a training camp with no referees," Randall said. "If I had gone to France, for example, I would have been singled out for special treatment. As world champion, you become a target. I wanted to be away from potential competitors in Europe.

"In Japan, nobody was going to try and beat me up. They are honourable there, purist and traditional." For months now, nothing has been allowed to cloud Randall's thinking for Sydney. "Every day of my life is planned out to the Olympics," he said.

Some observers have suggested that Randall got lucky when he won the world light-middleweight title in Birmingham last October and the player himself acknowledges that good fortune is a factor, but he is adamant, too, that he can repeat that success in Sydney.

Randall, 25, was due to have gone to Wroclaw, Poland, in May for the European championships, but he had to tell selectors that he would have to withdraw because of a back injury. Even before that he had said that the European title was not a priority, that he was treating the event more as a training exercise.

"I am more interested in making sure that I am firing right for the Games, not the Europeans," he said. "It is not a serious injury and I am withdrawing just as a precautionary measure. It would have been nice to win a medal but it pales into insignificance against a world or Olympic medal."

Randall is the first British man to achieve global success in judo since Neil Adams in 1981. Adams never quite made it to the rank of Olympic champion, winning silver twice, and still Britain awaits its first Olympic judo gold medal-winner.

Is Randall the man? "I am very confident," he said. "If I prepare and fight as I did for the world championships, with the bit of luck you need there is no reason why I cannot go all the way."

In the meantime, he has been all the way to Mount Fuji, home of the Japan Olympic camp. Such is the regard in which the Japanese hold Randall that he was the only outsider invited to step into their inner circle. "There were about ten Japanese and me in my weight category," he said. "We were up at dawn running up the side of the mountain."

Daily conditioning and judo sessions followed and, either side of his week at the Olympic camp, he spent several days at the Tokai University club. Among the things that he was pleased to get home to in Edinburgh was breakfast. In Japan he had stuck to toast and tea. "I didn't fancy what they were having," he said. "It was indescribable."

Why hadn't Blue Peter warned him about Japanese breakfasts? The children's television programme, after all,was responsible for capturing his imagination on the subject of judo. "I saw it on Blue Peter and, the next day, went along to the local club at Lasswade High School," Randall recalled. That was in 1986 and, when he went on the programme recently, they showed the old footage that had tempted him to take to the mat, as well as film of him winning his world gold medal.

To the early teenagers who saw his reappearance, the medal was good but the Blue Peter gold badge was better. The gold badge is awarded rarely and usually only to children for bravery or outstanding achievement. Randall took it along to the judo club at Drummond Community High School, where his fiancee teaches, and found that they were more excited to see the badge than his world gold medal.

But so would he have been some years earlier. "I was genuinely touched to receive it," Randall said. "When you are a kid, you always think it would be cool to have one." As a kid, Randall was full of himself. Once, travelling back home from training at the Edinburgh Club, his seniors got fed up with his lip and ordered him out of the car.

"It was frightening, really," he said. "It was pitch dark, down a country lane and I had to run home." By then, though, aged 17, he was growing accustomed to harsh treatment. "The older players at the Edinburgh club knew I had potential and took it upon themselves to put me through the mill," Randall said.

"A lot of it was mental abuse, to see if I could handle it, but sometimes I would go home at night, broken bits hanging off me. It was important for them to know whether it was worth their effort to put a lot of time into me. "Deep down I knew there was a reason and, looking back, it worked. It made me tough, made me hard, and that is what brings me through a lot of fights now."

He has much to thank the Edinburgh club for. The club may look "like some posh person's house", as Randall describes it, but it is a school of hard knocks. The Bone Collector wouldn't dare go close.

David Powell
The Times