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Home / Bay of Plenty Times

2020 Olympic Games: Tauranga's Ana Moceyawa focused on Morocco wrestling win

Kristin Macfarlane
By Kristin Macfarlane
Bay of Plenty Times·
15 Jan, 2020 08:53 PM4 mins to read

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Tauranga wrestler Ana Moceyawa is set on Olympics qualification. Photo / File

Tauranga wrestler Ana Moceyawa is set on Olympics qualification. Photo / File

Ana Moceyawa has her eyes set on representing New Zealand at the 2020 Olympic Games - and she has one last chance to do so.

The Tauranga wrestling, grappling and judo champion spent much of 2019 gaining new experiences to help her Olympics wrestling campaign and planned to spend the first few months of this year achieving that ultimate goal.

However, instead of having two chances of qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics, she now only has one.

Moceyawa was due to compete at the 2020 Oceania Wrestling Championship this month - an event that doubled as an Olympic qualifier - but that has since been cancelled due to the measles outbreak in Samoa.

This means her last chance to qualify is at the African and Oceania Olympic Games Qualifier wrestling competition in Morocco between March 13- 15 - leaving her without any major wrestling competitions to help her preparations.

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She is focused though - and while she has the opportunity to compete in next month's Oceania grappling champs - her only goal is to make the New Zealand team.

"My goal is, I want to win Morocco. That is definitely possible, I just need to probably go back overseas to train for that though.

"It would be good to have a competition [before] Morocco just for mental preparation and just getting nerves."

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To qualify, she has to make the top two and doing that would be a dream come true.

"Top two would mean a lot. It is a possibility."

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Moceyawa has spent many months working on that dream. She trains twice a day, six days a week, even travelling to Hamilton and Auckland most weekends, while working full-time.

Last year she competed at the World Championship competition in Kazakhstan, won gold in the Senior Female 62kg division at the 2019 Australia Cup in Melbourne, travelled to Guam to compete at the Oceania wrestling championships, added a national grappling title to her national judo and wrestling titles and spent a few months in Indiana, in the United States to improve her wrestling.

"It was a great experience," she said of the world champs.

She said it was a place where world champs and former world champs came to compete, with some even losing in their first round. She said it was intense and you never knew who would win.

"I think that's the whole point of wrestling. I think it's a very humbling sport in that sense and it was cool to see even the top-level wrestlers, that they still need to train every day there is no rest. To be on top you need to train like that.

But it was the American training trip that opened her eyes.

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"I got to experience obviously this hard training and I got lots of training partners but also like the culture over there was pretty cool, it was probably one of the best trips I've ever had. I think my wrestling has definitely got better since that."

She was training at high school and university level and says the biggest comparison between America and New Zealand when it comes to wrestling is that "everyone knows and understands wrestling there and it's a culture".

There was no shortage of females to train with either, something she struggles with back home. She says she would love to live there and was faced with plenty of possibilities and opportunities while there.

"I had at least 10 girls I could wrestle every single day, whereas here I'm lucky to have one every now and then.

"You could literally improve every day if you put your mind to it."

After that, Moceyawa says relocating to grow in her sport is a "real possibility".

"New Zealand will always be home and it's comfortable here and everything like that but I think you really need to step outside your comfort zone and make new sacrifices to make it to the top, so it's that breaking point now where I'm like 'okay how much do I want it?' And then going for it."

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