The female icon of Japanese sport has done it at last by winning the Olympic title for the country that invented judo and regards it as their own.

If Ian Thorpe’s gold medals were greeted with a mixture of delight and relief by Australia, then the victory of Ryoko Tamura generated similar emotions in Japan. Her triumph was headline news in Tokyo yesterday, as newspapers and television stations greeted her win with uncharacteristic fervor.

The 10,000-capacity judo hall was packed with seemingly every Japanese person in the southern hemisphere, as spectators and more than 150 television cameramen and photographers struggled for access.

Judo is the only sport Japan has given to the Games, according it special status in that country. However, Tamura’s fame is founded on a newspaper cartoon strip, “Yawara-chan”, based partly on her life, in which a tiny girl once beat up thugs on the streets.

As a teenager, Tamura, her pig-tails kept in place by red bows, once routed five boys in a fracas. The cartoon is a curious interweaving of fact and fantasy.

Only 4ft 9½in tall and weighing barely 7st, bantamweight Tamura won four successive world titles in the 1990s but lost the last two Olympic finals. In 1996, in one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport, she was beaten by a North Korean, who had only been given a wild-card entry. Japan went into mourning.

But on Saturday night, cheered by thousands of her countrymen and women, blowing whistles, waving flags and sporting clothing and bandanas decorated with Tamura’s name, she was at last victorious.

Before the contest, she is quoted to have said: "The best case is gold; the worst case is gold." In the final, she exploded into action after 14 seconds and hurled Lioubov Brouletova of Russia to the mat for ippon, the sport’s equivalent of a knock-out in boxing, with harai-goshi (a sweeping hip throw).

Tamura said afterwards: "I fought as if my life was at stake. I thought of all the people who have supported me and sent me so many letters and messages. This was their gold medal not just mine."

Tamura hopes to continue until the Athens Olympics. Many more episodes of the celebrated comic strip are still to come.

The Times