Stepping out onto the world stage is nothing new for Hidemi Uchiage.
The Ippon Dojo instructor and Bert Church High School math teacher was in Salzburg, Austria, recently with Team Canada at the Salzburg Open karate tournament.
The tournament is part of the Karate1 (K1) series of premier league events (up to 10), which are put on every year by the World Karate Federation.
Much like Formula One’s Grand Prix circuit, competitors go to a series of events around the world where if they finish ninth or higher they gain points in their overall standings.
Uchiage finished ninth overall in female kata category, while she and her Canadian teammates, Daphne Trahan-Perreault, and Sumi Uchiage finished fifth in female team kata.
“It was a very tough competition,” Uchiage said. “It’s a lot bigger than the world championships, because more than one person gets to go per country.”
In the first round, Uchiage lost to the current world champion Kiyou Shimizu, which prevented her from progressing to a medal-place round.
“She was really good,” Uchiage said of her opponent. “She ended up winning the tournament, and unfortunately I didn’t make it to bronze.”
However, it was a match that her husband and fellow Ippon instructor Adam Wackershauser feels was a lot closer than expected.
“It was a closer match than (Hidemi) thought it would be,” he said. “That might change her strategies going forward into the next competitions.
“Her hope was to be in the top five but unfortunately that didn’t happen this time. Competition is so tight, between the fifth-place person and 15th-place person it’s literally millimeters different.
“It’s super close, but she did very well.”
Raised in Richmond B.C. (where her family owned a karate club), the 32-year-old Uchiage has been with Team Canada for seven years, and is one of the most decorated Karateka in Canada, having medalled almost 30 times at national level, as well as being a Pan American Junior Champion, and a US Open Top Five finisher.
This year has been as busy as any before in terms of the amount of time she spends travelling and training, with her hectic schedule to continue as she prepares for the
The 30th annual Pan American Karate Championships, which are to be held May 23 to 29 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“I’m off to Vancouver for inter-regional training session,” she said. “It’s so hard to get Team Canada together because of how big the country is, so all of the athletes from the western side of Canada get together in B.C., to train.
“We’ll see how everything goes from there.”
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