We had booked leave off work and Talitha had trained hard for this competition so we decided to make the journey from Adelaide to Melbourne.
Rather than going to the competition for the full 3 days we decided to see some other sights before and after and just attended on the Saturday.

As soon as the doors opened we checked out the draw and time that she would be competing.
Talitha was scheduled to compete just after 10am. We sat for a few minutes and watched some of the really little kids compete then we went out to warm up.
Warm up was cut extremely short though and after going though just a couple of positional situations she was called to the mats.

Talitha’s division contained just four kids, 2 girls and 2 boys with each girl paired with a boy in the semi-finals.
I’m not sure why they decided not to pair the girls together based on the limited opportunity they get to compete.

Talitha began the fight and pulled guard. Peter (her opponent) was very quick and blocked her from closing her guard.
Peter jumped Talitha’s open guard and secured side control. Talitha was fighting to regain her guard however, Peter did a very good job of controlling this position.
With a minute down on the clock Peter mounted and grabbed hold of Talitha’s arm to arm bar her….

Then the referee stopped the fight for seemingly no reason at all. Both Peter and Talitha had no idea why the fight was stopped and were both as surprised as each other.
The referee gave Peter the win and told her that her gi was too tight. Talitha protested and the referee came over and gave his explanation.
Talitha was quite upset that she didn’t have a chance to finish the fight.
She was down on points and was in a bad position but she would rather have been beaten in competition than have the referee take the opportunity away from her.

Peter went on to win the final and Talitha was awarded the bronze medal.

Around 40 minutes later they started checking all gi’s before entering the mats using the correct tool, not just guessing once the match was already in progress.

Talitha on the podium

Gi checking underway…. eventually