the first out gay man to fight olympic judo got his jaw broken for celebrating a win

via PinkNews and OC Media, with JudoInside and dpa.

There are three metal plates in Timo Cavelius's jaw now. They put them in at Leipzig University Hospital the same night, after the two teeth came out and before anyone had finished arguing about whose fault it was.

Here is what he did to earn them. On September 5, in a German Judo Bundesliga team match, Cavelius of TSV Abensberg beat Akaki Japaridze of JC Leipzig for the second time in under an hour. Then he turned toward his own bench and raised a fist.

Japaridze punched him three times.

what a raised fist cost

Cavelius is 29. He is a three-time German national champion, took silver at the 2023 Paris Grand Slam, sits 41st in the world, and at Paris 2024 he became the first out gay man ever to compete in Olympic judo. He was working his way back toward Los Angeles 2028, which for a man ranked 41st is not a victory lap, it is arithmetic: points, tournaments, a calendar with no gaps in it.

He now has a gap of ten to twelve weeks. He misses the World Championships in Baku in October entirely. The qualification math for 2028 was already tight and just got worse, and none of it happened because he lost.

"I wanted to celebrate with my teammates, and then it all started," he said. "At first, I was completely in shock." He says the beating continued after he was on the ground, and that "the situation was only brought to an end when my teammates intervened immediately."

the part where he blames the celebration

Japaridze, 24, has since posted on Instagram. It is a genuinely strange document, because it does two opposite things in the space of a paragraph. "Any form of physical aggression in sport is unacceptable. I do not evade responsibility for what happened," he wrote, and then said the cause was not the defeat but his opponent's behavior, which he found "insulting to my honour, both verbally and through gestures."

Cavelius's answer is worth reading in full, because of what he thought he was being accused of. The celebration, he said, was for his own team and nothing more, and "at no point was it my intention to humiliate Akaki Japaridze as an athlete or to insult him because of his background, his nationality or his identity as a Georgian man." He added: "I neither insulted him verbally nor attacked him physically."

So we want to be exact here, because a lot of people online have not been. Nobody involved has said this was about Cavelius being gay. Japaridze's stated grievance is a gesture. The German federation's statement is about violence, not bigotry. There is no source for a homophobic motive and we are not going to invent one, because the facts as they actually stand are damning enough: the only out gay man in the history of Olympic judo had his face broken by a man who could not stand losing twice in an hour.

what the sport said back

The German Judo Federation called itself "deeply shocked and appalled," and added the line that is the entire point of the sport: "Violence has no place in judo. Judo stands for respect, appreciation, and mutual esteem." Its high performance director, the former Olympic medallist Miryam Roper, put it better than any statement we have read this year. "Anyone who steps onto the mat entrusts their physical integrity to their opponent. That trust is the foundation of our sport."

JC Leipzig, Japaridze's own club, apologized publicly. The Georgian Judo Federation said the attack "contradicts the principles of judo." German police are investigating on suspicion of bodily harm, which will be interesting, since Japaridze is understood to have gone home to Georgia. The International Judo Federation could ban him for life and has not ruled yet.

It is worth remembering what this looks like when it goes right. Ten days ago two out men played a tennis final in Austria and the one who lost hugged the one who won, and the whole internet went soft about it for a day. That is the ordinary, unremarkable, deeply boring standard. Shake hands. Go home. Let the man who beat you celebrate with his friends.

Cavelius will be eating through a straw until roughly December. Japaridze is in Georgia. Judo, a sport that literally translates as the gentle way, is waiting to find out whether it means it.