Old competition footage

I was looking through my harddrive for a specific training video the other day, and ended up watching old competition videos instead. I thought it was pretty fun to watch, so I got the idea of editing it all together into one video and put it online, so I will always have it here on the blog in case I lose the files, harddrive dies etc.

Most of the videos are from 2002-2003 but a few of them are from 2001. At this time, there were no competitions in Denmark, and we were very excited about the thought of competing, so we had to make our own. A few of these videos are from competitions we held in our own gym. We even made some in-house "MMA" tournaments (inspired by the early UFC of course), wearing helmets and allowing knees, elbows and headbutts. They were held by gentleman rules, so if we ended in a situation, where we thought the fight would have been over if it was full power and no helmets, we would stop there.

Later on, I started the "Openmat" tournaments, which where more organized with several danish gyms participating. I remember that at the first Openmat tournament I organized and competed in, I had no idea on how to do a triangle or what sidecontrol was. I just remembered seeing it in a book or video somewhere, so I tried it out (with no luck, needless to say). Quite fun to see today, so many years later, I wish I had recorded more of my matches back then.

The video is quite long, over an hour, and I don't expect anyone to watch all of it really, this is mostly for my own amusement. If you do watch it however, you might even find a match against a young Martin Kampmann there somewhere :)