Defeat: The only people that never lost are those that never went against the best competition. In life and jiu jitsu, defeat is as certain as death and taxes in other people lives. The question then, is not whether you will be defeated, but how you will react when defeated. Of course the initial reaction is always emotional, but after that comes two general types of reaction. The first is denial. The athlete tells him or herself that the loss was an aberration due to outside factors, an injury, a distraction, an unfavorable environment or whatever. The loss is dismissed and the athlete goes on doing what he has always done and goes to the next match essentially the same person. The second approach is acceptance. The athlete accepts the defeat as a sign that something needs to be changed if the cause of that defeat is to be overcome. It may be something small, or it may be a major overhaul, but some form of modification is necessary. This second approach generally gets the better results in the long term (though many athletes have had good careers using the first). Here Eddie Cummings and his team show the pain of a narrow loss by penalty in over time at the world championships, but already ideas of change and modification are going through our minds photo by Tiago Molinos
