From the Bermuda Sun

There’s only one real way to train to be a fighter and that’s to fight.

Bermuda’s San Shou team have been preparing for the regional championships for the brutal full contact Chinese fighting art – with full-on, no holds barred fight sessions.

Garon Wilkinson, president of the Bermuda San Shou association, said the four fighters who head to Brazil on July 13 and their sparring partners had been slugging it out at regular Wednesday ‘fight club’ sessions to prepare their bodies and brains to react under the extreme pressure of fight conditions.

“You can do all the running, skipping and jumping in the initial stages but the only way to truly prepare cardiovascularly for a fight is to actually fight.

“Ordinary sparring doesn’t really prepare you for the sort of oxygen debt you experience when you get hit so we’ve introduced weekly fight sessions to our training regimen.

“Basically we just warm up and then go at it as hard as we can.

“We find our fighters are getting nervous before Wednesday fight sessions. We want them to be nervous because that’s what they will have to deal with in a fight.”

The full programme is actually extremely sophisticated, incorporating plyometrics, mitt work, boxing training, strength and conditioning, spinning and beach work as well as fight techniques and tactics.

The team Sentwali Woolridge, Wilkinson, Jermal Woolridge and Leroy Maxwell, all of whom competed in the World Championships in Beijing in November last year, have been in training since January, a minimum of five times a week.

Despite the heavy sessions on Wednesday there is no let-off on Thursdays, one of the toughest days of the week.

“You need to prepare your body for back-to-back fights. My fight in Beijing was at 11.30 at night.

“If I’d have won I’d have been fighitng again at 7.30 in the morning. You have to be able to take a bruising and a battering and still get up the next morning and do it all again, so we’re training hard on Thursdays too.

“In some sports you can not train and the worst that can happen is that you are going to get a bad result. If we don’t train, well….”

The team have adapted their programme over the past few years, incorporating features from the other countries they have met at past tournaments.

“Our programme has become pretty developed over the past few years. Every time we go to compete we learn something new.

“Going to the World Championships was just amazing. We got to see how our style of fighting in the west measures up to the European and Asian styles.

“We tend to use more of a boxing/kick boxing style. They really use their martial arts skills more.

“There’s a lot more straight knockouts with kicks.

“Our basis is in traditional martial arts so we have the skills to fight that way. It is just a matter of being able to blend everything together, which is really tough.”

Wilkinson believes that, though the competition will be tough at the PanAm Wushu Championships, it will not be as competitive as the worlds.

And he believes that Bermuda, who picked up two silvers and two bronzes at this event last year, has genuine medal prospects.

“All of us are experienced fighters now. We have had at least five fights. If everything goes well I don’t see why we shouldn’t come away with gold.”

Pan Am Wushu Championships
San Shou section

Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

July 13 – 20

Bermuda team: Sentwali Woolridge (Under 70kg), Garon Wilkinson (under 75kg), Leroy Maxwell (under 85kg), Jermal Woolridge (Over 90kg), Oscar Lightbourne (judge), Damion Wilson (coach), Khalid Pitcher (coach) Talia Iris (manager).

In a summer when all eyes were on China for the 2008 summer Olympics, 13-year-old Danielle Snell was practicing a sport based on traditional Chinese martial arts.

The Churchill Junior High School eighth-grader has been practicing wushu since she was 9 years old and has traveled to China for summer training three times. She trains with Wulin World of Martial Arts in Bartonville and competes several times a year.

“I saw a performance at a tournament and I wanted to get into that,” she said of Wushu. “The forms that I’ve learned with them are really neat. Wushu is smoother at some points (than other martial arts), but it can get stronger.”

She received the 2007 Wushu Student of the Year Award from the Illinois Combat Karate Organization and is a junior black belt in tae kwon do.

During the summer, Danielle trains about two hours weekly in wushu. Once school starts, she commutes to and from Bartonville twice weekly to train for two hours on Friday evenings and between six and eight hours on Saturdays.

When there’s a tournament on the horizon, it’s three-hour practices five days per week.

“Usually, if I know I have practice that night, I try to get most of it (her homework) done in study hall,” Danielle said of balancing her demanding schedule and keeping up her grades. She also totes schoolwork along with her in the car and, if she doesn’t finish everything, she’ll stay up late to get it done.

But martial arts isn’t the only thing on her plate. Danielle also participates in the Churchill choir, takes tumbling and is a member of the Hispanic-Latino Resource Group.

She also participates in the 30-minute children’s segment of “La Hora Latina,” a weekly two-hour bilingual radio program broadcast on WVKC 90.7 FM.

Danielle became involved with the program after being interviewed on “La Hora Latina” for a martial arts tournament. Her mother, Erin, who hails from Mexico, also volunteered with the program and would take Danielle with her.

“Most of it’s in Spanish, but there’s little things in English that I read,” Danielle said of the program. “I enjoy doing it.”

Her Hispanic heritage is important to Danielle. In addition to the radio program, she also is a member of Mexico Lindo, a Mexican folk dancing troupe. The dancers perform at schools and events throughout the year.

“Some of the little girls who are 4 years old won’t go out there (on stage) if Danielle’s not with them,” her father, William, said. “They look up to her.”

Regular trips to Mexico also help Danielle keep in touch with her Hispanic heritage, as the majority of her mother’s relatives live there. She says she enjoys visiting her relatives so “I don’t lose touch with the Mexican part of me.”

Danielle was recently recognized by the Galesburg City Council for all of her hard work. She received the Youth Extra Effort Award from Mayor Gary Smith at the Aug. 18 City Council meeting.

Rhonda Brady, director of the Knox County Area Project, nominated her for the award.
“I didn’t expect it at all,” Danielle said of the award. She thinks Brady nominated her “because I was helping out on the radio, giving my time on the radio when I could be hanging out or watching TV. I felt really honored.”

By Tarra Quismundo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:01:00 08/26/2008

MANILA, Philippines—Upon seeing the tiny athlete with a gold medal around his neck, passengers on the immigration queue broke into applause. Tourists posed with him for photos and a passenger pointed a kid to the medalist passing by.

In a country deprived of Olympic joy when athletes from the regular sports failed in their courageous bid to land a medal, 24-year-old Willy Wang arrived Monday giving people who saw him at the airport reason to celebrate.

“I am happy because we got a gold in the Olympics,” said Wang, who prepared just as hard—and as long—as the athletes who were counted on to deliver the country’s first Olympic gold medal.

Wang, who prepared for the event for eight months, won the gold in wushu, a demonstration event whose results do not count on the official medal standings.

“Even if it’s a special event, I am happy that we won a gold,” said the Filipino-Chinese world champion in heavily accented Filipino.

Wang, who started training in the martial art when he was 12, snagged the gold in the demonstration event held on the side of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where most of the country’s overmatched delegation failed to make it even past the preliminary stages of their events.

Wang’s victory marked the only time the Philippine national anthem was played in Olympic City.

Wang shared that other Filipino athletes in Beijing were happy about his win despite missing their own medal goals in the quadrennial.

“Their training was really hard, they did all the preparation and they did not get any medals, but at least I got one for the country. My friends [from other events] are happy about it,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer while waiting at the baggage carousel at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 2.

He believes wushu has a strong chance to become an Olympic event soon, but not within the slowly expiring shelf life of his career.

“By the next Olympics, I might already have retired, because that’s still a long time away, four years,” Wang said. “Maybe [I’m retiring] next year, because I’m old [for the sport], I’m already 24.

“I’d like to do business instead, maybe [with] computers,” he said with a grin.

Wang arrived on a Philippine Airlines flight around 5:40 p.m. Monday along with officials of the Philippine delegation, among them Philippine Olympic Committee president Jose “Peping” Cojuangco and the team’s chief of mission, Bacolod Rep. Monico Puentevella.

Said Cojuangco of Wang’s sport: “I think it has a good prospect because the Chinese are really working hard to get it in, there’s a big effort to get it in.”

Asked about the Philippine team’s performance, he said: “They performed as best as they can. They broke their own Philippine records. They did the way we expected them to do, only the competition was really tough.”

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