Hitomi Obara

She lost the selection races for Athens and Beijing and retired once. Then she came back, dropped a weight class, remade her body, and at thirty-one stood in her first Olympic Games and won. Born Sakamoto in Hachinohe, Aomori, she came through Shigakkan University and served as a captain in the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, so competing was never her only job. In London in 2012 she took the women's 48 kg freestyle gold, and the Medal with Purple Ribbon followed that year. She left the mat immediately afterward, coached, and joined the national women's staff in early 2025. She died that July, aged forty-four. The gold matters to me because it came after the failing, not instead of it.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Hitomi Obara

Name (Japanese)

小原日登美

Reading

おばら ひとみ

Born

January 4, 1981

Origin

Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, Japan

Height

156 cm

Occupation

amateur wrestler

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Capricorn / Rooster

University

Shigakkan University

Awards & achievements

• 2012 Medal with Purple Ribbon

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitomi%20Obara
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8F%E5%8E%9F%E6%97%A5%E7%99%BB%E7%BE%8E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263677

Tags

• Aomori Prefecture
• amateur wrestler

Last updated

September 18, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.