Natsumi Tsunoda, Japan’s triple World Champion and Olympic gold medalist in the -48kg division is retiring from competition.
Tsunoda held a press conference on Friday to announce her retirement and said that she will be focusing on promoting judo in the future. “In my heart, this is retirement,” Tsunoda said. “… From now on, even if I’m not an athlete, I want to walk through life with judo,” she added.
A former -52kg player, Tsunoda moved down a weight to -48kg towards the end of 2019 and had her greatest success in the lower weight class. As a -52k player she was World silver medalist in 2017. As a -48kg player, she had a string of consecutive successes, winning the World title in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and capping off her career with an Olympic gold in 2024.
Tsunoda was an unusual player in that she specialized in a very limited range of techniques. She won almost all her matches with tomoe-nage. If the tomoe-nage failed, she would immediately clamp on a juji-gatame. It was a simple game plan but one that her opponents could not stop.
In winning the -48kg gold at the 2024 Olympics, she became Japan’s first gold medal winner at the Paris Games. She was also Japan’s oldest gold medal winner, winning the title less than a month before her 32nd birthday.
Her retirement has been a long time coming. She last competed in the Baku Grand Slam in February 2025. In her retirement announcement, Tsunoda said that she wanted to experience competing wearing the gold back patch (given to Olympic champions). Although she won gold in Baku, she was not confident about going forward with competition.
Tsunoda said after consulting her manager, coaches and others, she finally made the decision to retire from competition. “I still have the desire to do judo but when it comes to competing, I want to win and do my best. I don’t have the confidence to do that right now,” she said. “I still want to enjoy judo and I don’t want to end up hating it.”
