MU Judo Club Secures First Ever Gold at Intervarsities

On 14 March 2026, the Judo Club took part in the Intervarsities of Judo organised by DU Judo Club in Trinity College Dublin. The tournament was divided into four categories: teams, belt, weight, and novices.

Hlieb Verbovenko, President of the club, explains how accessible the sport is to newcomers. He himself started last year and is already an orange belt, which is the third belt out of nine.  With a background in Greco-Roman wrestling, he has become passionate about judo: “It helps me to understand that you don't always win”, he explains, “that sometimes you might lose, but it's important to keep going”. 

Coach of the club, Sergei Varonik, discerns this as “spirit of judo”: “It’s about respecting each other”, he says. “We don’t only learn how to win but also how to lose. If you keep on standing up, you transform judo into reality, and it helps with your personal life”. Varonik has been coaching in Maynooth for five years, having seen the club start small before reaching the 2025 European Universities Combat Sports Championships in Warsaw, Poland. Usually, students will join the club as complete beginners and progress through belts until they get to orange or green, like Verbovenko. 

Two of the three categories of the tournament did not take into account the competitors’ skill level: the team and weight fights. “It looks a bit more intimidating when you see the black belt”, admits Verbovenko, “but it’s all in your head.” Verbovenko himself won matches against a few black belts, performing well overall. “When I step onto the mat, I don’t think about winning [...]. I don’t think about the belt”, he says, reiterating the spirit of the sport.

The maximum duration of a judo fight is four minutes. If a perfect throw, called ‘ippon’, is performed, the fight can end in a matter of seconds. If not, points are won through either ‘yuko’, which is the smallest score, or ‘wazari’, which is half of the full score. “Judo is a sport in which everything can change so quickly. And that's basically what life is, right?”, suggests Verbovenko. “It’s short fights”.

The club has a lot of beginners as well as more experienced judokas. Verbovenko explains how a society member competing as a white belt, who only started this year, won second place in his category. The club also won first place in the team category, having won every single fight.

Another newcomer, Jaime Muley, is an Erasmus student and black belt judoka from Spain. He has practiced judo since he was three years old and explains how the Judo Club has shown him a new way of seeing the sport. “Sergei (Varonik) is very different from my coach in Spain”, says Jaime Muley, “he insists a lot on work”. He explains that Varonik’s approach to judo is more physical, which has helped him find a new way of competing. “I’m glad we won the team’s competition”, adds Muley, “I think we deserve it, and I’m glad I could give back to the club”. 

“If you train the body, you also train the brain”, concludes Varonik. To him, judo is not only about fighting on the mat, but also about being friends with your opponents off it. Judo is all about values, and the main ones are respect and discipline.

The Intervarsities of Judo were the last tournament of the semester for the Judo club, concluding the year with a gold medal in the team competition, the first gold medal in the club’s history.