Michelle Jorgensen brings the first-ever gold medal at the Super Cup Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Championships home to Kelowna on Apr. 7, 2018.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Alliance Jiu-Jitsu - Kelowna
April 17, 2018 - 6:30 AM
KELOWNA - A Kelowna woman, who is legally blind, won the gold medal at the inaugural Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition in Kamloops last week.
Michelle Jorgensen, 24, won three matches at the Super Cup Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Championships on Apr. 7. She brought the gold medal to her team Alliance Jiu-Jitsu in Kelowna. It was her first-ever tournament.
Jorgensen is a full-time psychology student at UBCO who went to a Women’s Only Self-Defense Seminar at the Alliance Jiu-Jitsu Academy approximately 12 months ago.
After the seminar Jorgensen began spending her free time at the club practising Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Muay-Thai Kickboxing.
A media release says she also quit smoking that week, and has been smoke-free for a year.
“At the self-defense seminar Michelle was the first to arrive and it only took me about a 30 seconds to realize she had a vision issue,” Alliance Jiu-Jitsu owner, Sean McHugh, says.
Jorgensen was born with a rare eye disease called PFV (Persistent Fetal Vasculature) which affects only a couple of people in Canada per year.
She credits a lot of her success to her coaches Sean McHugh, Cody Earp, Kristian Fraser and her team at Alliance Jiu-Jitsu.
McHugh says Jorgensen is a work horse and deserves to be recognized for the hard work she puts in.
As well as being a full-time student and athlete, Jorgensen volunteers at a variety of charities and still attends her practise consistently.
Jorgensen is also planning on competing in Richmond this June.
We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won’t censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor.
News from © iNFOnews, 2018