Head of De­vel­op­ment for Fed­er­a­tion In­ter­na­tion­al Am­a­teur de Sam­bo (FIAS), the gov­ern­ing body of the com­bat art called Sam­bo, Dr An­drew Moshanov, held a work­shop in T&T on Thurs­day, with the pur­pose of de­vel­op­ing the sport in T&T and ul­ti­mate­ly the Caribbean. The T&T Com­bat Sport As­so­ci­a­tion (T&TC­SA), the lo­cal gov­ern­ing body for the new­ly es­tab­lished sport in the coun­try, held a press con­fer­ence at Rough House, St James, the pre­mier gym for na­tion­al com­bat sport team train­ing in T&T on Fri­day. Sam­bo, a sport with roots in the more pop­u­lar Ju­do, has been present in T&T since 2000 but has of­fi­cial­ly been placed sole­ly un­der the aus­pices of the T&TC­SA. Since be­ing of­fi­cial­ly formed in Ju­ly last year, the T&TC­SA has reg­is­tered 15 clubs and just un­der 240 stu­dent mem­bers.

Moshanov has al­so worked with the T&TC­SA in pro­vid­ing a five-year de­vel­op­men­tal plan with the Min­istry of Sport in an ef­fort to ex­pand the sport and for train­ing of qual­i­fied in­struc­tors. At the mo­ment there is on­ly a hand­ful of qual­i­fied in­struc­tors in T&T. Moshanov, an ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber of FIAS, is a for­mer coach of the So­vi­et Union and Russ­ian Sam­bo team and has in­struct­ed six world cham­pi­ons in the sport. Since his ar­rival on Thurs­day morn­ing, Moshi­nov has held a work­shop with a wide cross sec­tion of grap­pling, mixed mar­tial arts, ju­do and ath­letes of oth­er com­bat art sports and has iden­ti­fied sev­er­al out­stand­ing ath­letes who he says have the po­ten­tial to medal in ma­jor cham­pi­onships.

The T&TC­SA has shown an in­ter­est in com­pet­ing in the Pan Amer­i­can Sam­bo Cham­pi­onship be­ing held in Colom­bia from Sep­tem­ber 21-25 and as a re­sult, has been in­vit­ed to par­tic­i­pate with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion. It is the first time that a Caribbean na­tion will par­tic­i­pate in such an event.

Moshanov has de­scribed the dis­ci­pline as one ide­al for self-de­fence for those work­ing in the pro­tec­tive ser­vices, in par­tic­u­lar the po­lice force and the mil­i­tary forces. The word sam­ba is an acronym for a Russ­ian phrase which lit­er­al­ly trans­lates to "self de­fence with­out weapons." Moshanov al­so de­scribed the art as one geared to­ward gen­er­al de­vel­op­ment, not on­ly as it re­lat­ed to self-de­fence in com­bat but al­so in sit­u­a­tions where one may need to brace them­selves from falling, or be­ing alert to dan­gers. Sam­bo is not yet recog­nised as an Olympic sport but Moshanov is con­fi­dent that it will soon be. The next chal­lenge for the T&TC­SA is the na­tion­al team's par­tic­i­pa­tion in the West In­dies Fight­ing Cham­pi­onship in Mar­tinique from June 1-3. The team will then go to the Bar­ba­dos Cham­pi­onship on June 24.