#DoSportLikeAGirl
Edna Guadalupe Carrillo Torres, 31 years old.
Judoka and Pan-American champion.
By Aletse Torres Flores
Illustration by: Mariana Robles | @brava_mx
Edna Guadalupe Carrillo Torres is a Mexican judo athlete. She was born on November 12, 1991 in Guadalajara, Jalisco. She has been practicing judo since she was four years old, but outside of the dojo she enjoys going to the movies, dancing, spending time with her daughter and meditating.
Throughout his sporting career he has won 14 medals: 11 in Pan American championships and three (his most important) in the Pan American Games: Bronze in Toronto (2015) and Lima (2019), as well as silver in Chile (2023).
Edna’s sporting curiosity began at the age of four as “a game”, her two older brothers trained judo and, little by little, she became integrated into that world. At first her mother did not want her to go in because of the risk it involved, but little Edna showed her that she knew how to defend herself against her:
“I started by imitating my brothers, they were my role model, I wanted to do what they wanted, then it was my first fight when I was little, I lost the first fight, but I won the others… and living that experience activated my chip”
In 1996 he had his first competition in the State Council for Sports Promotion (CODE), in which he won his category. On that occasion she was the youngest competitor in the competition, at only five years old.
Carrillo’s greatest sporting references were his brothers, but everything changed the day he saw the Mexican judoka Vanessa Zambotti at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.
“Before we didn’t have social networks and I didn’t know how far judo went, I did it for recreation. I remember that in Athens I saw Vanessa, and that was when that Olympic dream awakened in me for the first time.”
12 years later, Edna Carrillo attended her first Olympics in Rio 2016; Unfortunately they lost in the round of 16. However, she promised to return to get a medal.
Before that will happen, she has had to fight against gender inequality within judo, since Even though the women’s team obtained better results in national and international competitions, they always received less support and budget than their male colleagues: “I noticed certain irregularities, but you don’t want to believe that it is because I am a woman, but it is because of that… everything always goes to the side of the men.”
But that did not stop her, in 2021, she qualified for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, but had to decline because she found out that she was about to become a mother.
As a mother, she has noticed that sports institutions are not adapted for sports mothers, since there is no system to help them:
“It seems like everything works against you, no one supports you to take care of your baby, you have to train, travel, pay for equipment and no one cares. As if becoming a mother means you don’t return to sports.”
Edna also prevailed over this, as she found a balance between motherhood and training at such a level that she won a silver medal at the Pan American Games in Chile (2023).
He is currently training hard to get his qualification for the 2024 Olympic Games. In addition, he is about to finish his degree in Tourism Administration at the Institute of Higher Studies of Tamaulipas Anáhuac.
Edna hopes that Olympic dream comes true: “One has to embrace that dream and turn it into a goal and an objective, it can become reality because dreaming is flying.”
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“#HazDeporteComoNiña, narrative journalism about the inequalities experienced by girls, adolescents and women in sports” is a project devised by Marisa Foundation en in which ZonaDocs collaborated with the reporting and writing of the profiles of female athletes.
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“The Olympics are a dream that must be embraced to make it come true”