Willems and Parlati prepare for a new arrival 06 Nov 2026 20:00 Beauchemin-Pinard bows out 06 Nov 2026 19:20 Korea’s three head coaches walk away 02 Nov 2026 20:25 Lytvynenko beats Sampaio in Abu Dhabi final 31 Oct 2026 22:35 Doukkali wins Morocco’s first Grand Slam gold 30 Oct 2026 22:45 Aoife Coughlan, Australia’s first world number one 29 Oct 2026 23:00 Primo halts Keldiyorova’s Grand Slam comeback 29 Oct 2026 17:45 Cargnin: two weight classes, one winning mentality 20 Oct 2026 12:00 Wakana Koga reaches world No. 1 after Baku gold 19 Oct 2026 12:00 Szymańska armlocked her way to a world final 16 Oct 2026 11:25 Tckaev rules the ranking, Grigalashvili rules him 12 Oct 2026 12:00 Tasoev beats Kokauri again for third world title 10 Oct 2026 16:55

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Aoife Coughlan, Australia’s first world number one

Australia has produced Olympic medallists in judo, Maria Pekli’s bronze in Sydney in 2000 being the one every Australian judoka grew up on, but it had never produced a world number one. Aoife Coughlan has changed that. The 31 year old from Traralgon in Victoria leads the senior IJF World Ranking at U70kg, the first Australian to do so, and she arrives at the Grand Slam in Abu Dhabi this week as the top seed in her category.

The ranking is the product of a long, unglamorous accumulation rather than one big win. At the 2025 World Championships in Budapest she was fifth. She won the Grand Prix in Linz in March 2025, then the Pan American Oceania Championships and the Oceania Open on the Gold Coast, and in November she reached the Abu Dhabi final and lost it. This year has been more of the same and better: silver at the Grand Slam in Tbilisi in March, the Oceania title in Melbourne in April, the Australian title in June, silver at the Grand Slam in Ulaanbaatar behind Shiho Tanaka of Japan, and silver at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in August. Finals, finals, finals. What Abu Dhabi offers her is the chance to turn one of them into gold with the number one next to her name.

A judo family from Ireland, a club in Traralgon

Her parents, Paul and Jean Coughlan, met through judo in Ireland before they moved to Australia, and the family did not stop at one. Her brother Eoin fought for Australia at the Rio 2016 Olympics and her sister Maeve has competed internationally at senior level. Aoife, Eef to those around her, started at Traralgon Judo Club at five, won seven Oceania age group medals between 2010 and 2015, six of them gold, and made her senior debut at the 2012 Oceania Championships in Cairns with silver at U63kg before moving up to U70kg. Oceania titles followed in 2017 and 2018. The international breakthrough came late and in quick succession: a first Grand Slam silver in Tokyo in December 2022 and a first Grand Prix gold in Portugal in January 2023.

Low, strong and relentless at U70kg

Her judo is built on physical strength, a low centre of gravity and pressure that does not let up for four minutes. She attacks from a right sided position with ko-uchi-gari and uses her seoi-nage variations to catch opponents who have settled in to defend the leg attack, and she breaks grips as a matter of routine. Australian coach Daniel Kelly and personal coach Emilien Freund run her programme from Melbourne, where she also coaches children’s judo and works in gym administration, with degrees in exercise science and sport management from Victoria University behind her. Reading, puzzles and the beach fill what is left of the week. None of that reads like the biography of a world number one, which is rather the point of this one.