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Story by Shannon Mullen

A few blocks from downtown Wakefield, out behind some warehouses, on the second floor of another warehouse, is a 5,000 square foot, state-of-the-art judo gym.

It is one of the US Judo Team’s four Olympic training centers, and some of the country’s top medal prospects are here, getting ready for the games in Beijing this summer.

Despite how it sounds, there’s no kicking or striking in judo, though the sport has its roots in jujitsu, a martial art dating back to the 16th century.

Here in Wakefield a dozen judo “players”, as they’re called, are practicing throws, their sport’s biggest crowd-pleaser.

The athletes are paired off on thick padded mats around a room the size of a tennis court, where players take turns hurling their opponents over their shoulders and onto the mats.

“You’re trying to put the other person on their back, which is how you score in judo, says 21-year-old Ronda Rousey, one of the top judo players in the world.

The 5′ 7″ and 155 pound, blonde California native is favored to become the first American to win Olympic gold in Judo this summer.

She brags that she could probably beat up most people she meets, but tonight, she’s up against her teammates. “I got beat up for about an hour and a half, pretty badly,” she said, after a two hour training session.

Rousey hates New England weather, especially winter. The draw to Massachusetts for her and a dozen other top judo players here from around the country, is their sensei, Wakefield native Jim Pedro. The two-time Olympic bronze medalist owns the dojo, and like his sport, is a relative unknown to many outside Wakefield.

“Judo is a fabulous sport,” says Pedro. “It involves throws pins and some submission holds, arm-locks and chokes. Unfortunately, the sport, all the terminology, the scoring, is Japanese, and it’s a little bit confusing to the public.”

Pedro describes his approach to coaching judo as unique in the sport. He expects athletes who train with him to work on finishing high school or college while they’re here, and most of them also volunteer and get jobs in the community.

“So when they do retire from the sport, they’ll be further along than if they just pursued the Olympics,” he explains. “That’s the approach I took in my career, and something I’m trying to pass on to our athletes.”

Pedro owns a three-story, eight bedroom house up the street from his dojo that’s just for the athletes to rent rooms.

“I haven’t been over there in a long time,” he says with a grin. “I try to keep it that way.” Without supervision Ronda Rousey likens living here to being on MTV’s reality show “The Real World,” with one exception. “We get to actually go fight each other every night,” says Rousey. “Whoever’s having a dispute in the house, you can really tell it at practice.”

Rousey’s roommates range in age from 17 to 25 and they compete at different levels.

They are also in different weight divisions, whose requirements mean that half the athletes’ in the house are trying gain weight while others need to shed pounds.

Rousey will compete in Beijing in the heaviest women’s division, and in the men’s heaviest class, 22-year-old Texas native Daniel McCormick weighs in at 320 pounds. “It’s all muscle,” McCormick says. “I probably eat at least 6000 calories a day. I eat everything, all the time.”

His roommate, 23-year-old Taraje Williams-Murray, is from the Bronx. “I’m the extra light weight, 132 pounds, the lightest division for the men,” says Williams-Murray. “I’m the definition of the weight-cutter, I think I’m pretty much the only one that has a very strict diet. I spend a lot of time watching the food network, to make my diet as tasty as possible.”

There are three refrigerators in the house, and you’d think they’d be chock full of healthy food, with world class athletes living here. But when 19-year-old Junior Judo player Aaron Kunihiro opens the freezer, it is obvious there is a taste for junk food among the athletes here.

“The microwavable kind of pizza that you’d find at Shaw’s in the prepared food section. We’ve got, one, 2 3 4 5 things of ice cream, and sherbert. Pizza’s a big favorite.”

When they’re not eating, or training six days a week, the housemates sleep and watch movies. And some play video games, but that is mostly the younger ones who aren’t prepping for Olympic matches in a matter of weeks.

In Ronda Rousey’s little spare time, she keeps a blog, and she took a bartending course at Harvard this past spring.

“The build-up for the Olympics is pretty long, and exhausting one, and sometimes I just wish it was tomorrow,” she says. “I feel prepared right now, so I feel like we’re just killing time until it comes, but I’d rather just go fight the match, not have to bother with the nerves in-between.”

Rousey doesn’t LOOK nervous; she laughs and smiles a lot, and that makes her eyes scrunch up like she’s squinting, but you can still see a steely, kind of scary look in them that says, “Go on, just try and beat me, I dare you.”

Ronda Rousey’s has but a few weeks left to perfect her stare-down and her world class moves.

She leaves for Beijing at the end of July.