Doug Rogers

Alfred Harold Douglas Rogers (January 26, 1941 – July 20, 2020) was a Canadian Olympic competitor in judo, and the first Canadian to win an Olympic medal in the sport. He was an honoured member in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. His best results were a silver medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and a gold medal at the Pan American Games, in 1967. He was a student of Masahiko Kimura. Biography Doug Rogers arrived in Japan in 1960 at the age of 19 with the specific intention of working on his judo. As a youth he had won the Ontario Minor Hockey Championships, where he finished the tournament's highest-scoring defenceman. At age 15, he had joined the judo club at the Montreal YMCA. It was not long before his sensei there told him there was nothing left for him to teach and directed him over to Fred Okimura's Montreal Seidokan dojo. He continued practicing while in high school, winning the Eastern Canada brown belt (ikkyu) title in 1958. The following year he won the black belt title. Although Rogers was accepted by McGill University, having been accepted to the Kodokan, Rogers boarded a plane for Japan in 1960. The best judo competitors at the time in Japan were coming out of the police academy and universities. These competitors would visit the Kodokan for practice on a weekly basis. Training at the Kodokan, Rogers made an effort to train with the judoka from the police academy and nearby Takushoku University (Takudai). It was in this way that he got to meet Masahiko Kimura, who was the coach of Takudai University and one of its more famous alumni. Able to hold his own against top judoka in Japan, the Canadian Olympic Committee, in search of medal hopefuls and, moreover, pleased that he was already in Japan where the Olympics were to be held, recruited Rogers. Rogers decided, however, to return to Canada to compete in the national championships, and the Olympic Committee were at first reluctant to pay for Rogers' airfare back to Japan. Eventually they settled for paying for a one-way ticket.