{{Russia\u2019s judo-mad President Vladimir Putin, who turned 60 earlier this week and in the past sparred with top judokas, has been promoted to the eighth dan in the sport, the International Judo Federation (IJF) said on Wednesday.}}<\/p>\n
The ninth dan indicates the rank of a grand master, and only a few living people in the world are believed to have the highest 10th dan.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Putin represents a high expression of the judo values in the world,\u201d IJF president Marius Vizer said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Putin is the martial art federation\u2019s honorary president.<\/p>\n
He started practicing sambo \u2014 the official in-house martial art of the KGB security services \u2014 when he was in his early teens before switching to judo.<\/p>\n
Putin, who is often pictured by the media wearing his judo uniform of zubon pants and jacket fastened by a black belt, also penned a judo manual and recorded an instructional DVD with world champion Yasuhiro Yamashita from Japan.<\/p>\n
Putin\u2019s minders often use his judo training sessions to demonstrate that the Russian leader, who returned to the Kremlin for a third term in May, is in top physical shape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{Russia\u2019s judo-mad President Vladimir Putin, who turned 60 earlier this week and in the past sparred with top judokas, has been promoted to the eighth dan in the sport, the International Judo Federation (IJF) said on Wednesday.}} The ninth dan indicates the rank of a grand master, and only a few living people in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[75,101],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-3471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","tag-homenews","tag-internationl","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3471"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=3471"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=3471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}