samooborona bez oruzhiya(Russian; self-defense without weapons). Sambo
started life as Kôdôkan Jûdô. From Sakhalin Island, 14-year-old Vasilij
Sergevich Oshchepkov was sent to Tokyo in 1906. Admitted to the Kôdôkan
in 1911, he earned his jûdô shôdan ranking in about six months and his sec-
ond-degree grade in about two years. In 1914 he moved to Vladivostok,
where he taught jûdô and did translations. In 1921 he went to work for the
Red Army, and in 1929 he introduced jûdô to Moscow. In 1936 the
Leningrad Sport Committee prohibited a competition between the Moscow
and Leningrad teams; Oshchepkov complained, was arrested on a charge of
being a Japanese spy, and subsequently died from what the Soviet police
termed a “fit of angina.” His students took the hint, and in November 1938
Anatolij Arcadievich Kharlampiev announced the invention of “Soviet
freestyle wrestling,” which coincidentally looked a lot like Russian-rules jûdô.
Following World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided that the
Soviets would compete in the Olympics. The Olympics already had interna-
tional freestyle wrestling, so in 1946 Soviet freestyle wrestling was renamed
sambo.(The acronym itself was the creation of Vladimir Spiridonov, but as
he had been an officer in the Tsarist army, of course the Soviets downplayed
his contributions, too.) Over time sambo and jûdô diverged, with the biggest
difference perhaps being that sambo’s philosophy emphasizes competition
and self-defense rather than mutual benefit and welfare.
Colonies were not exempt from these nationalistic tendencies. For ex-
ample, during the 1910s British policemen introduced boxing into South-
ern Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa. The idea was partly to wean
black Africans from fencing with sticks and Afrikaners from practicing big-
bore rifle shooting, and mostly to have fun. The Rhodesian and South
African whites were never happy about the black boxers, however. Put
crudely, settlers feared that black boxers would get uppity, while district of-
ficers feared the development of pan-tribal networks of any kind, including
the ones required to organize a boxing tournament. Therefore competitions
were mostly all-white affairs.
Racist attitudes also applied in India. As the British extended their
control into the Punjab during the 1840s and 1850s, British wrestlers be-
gan meeting Muslim and Sikh wrestlers. Wrote Richard Francis Burton,
“Not a few natives in my Company had at first the advantage of me, and
this induced a trial of Indian training” (Letter from Paul Nurse, August 28,
1996). As in Africa, Europeans were not happy about seeing white men
lose, so the Indian government prohibited mixed-race matches in 1874. De-
terring rajahs from wrestling with Europeans was harder, though. “My
great-grandfather Shivaji Rao... was a keen wrestler who loved to call
people off the streets to come into the old city palace to wrestle with him,”
Richard Shivaji Rao Holkar told Charles Allen during the 1980s. “In 190388 Combatives: Military and Police Martial Art Training