İlknur Kobaş

İlknur Kobaş — Biography

İlknur Kobaş is a Turkish judoka who competed at 61 kilograms, rose through the junior ranks to European and world level, and reached the peak of her career with a fifth-place finish at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. She stayed in judo after retiring from competition: she founded a club, worked at a university and coached the women's national team. She is also known as İlknur Kobaş Tepe.

Her breakthrough came in the junior categories. In 1994 she won gold at the World Junior Judo Championships in Cairo, took the European junior title in Lisbon the same year and repeated it a year later in Valladolid. The step up to senior level went well too: she won the Sofia World Cup in 1995 and took bronze at the World Cup in Leonding in 1998. In Atlanta she beat a Brazilian and a Chinese opponent to reach the quarter-finals, where a South Korean judoka stopped her and sent her to the repechage; two more wins put her in the bronze-medal contest, which she lost to Italy's Jenny Gal, finishing fifth.

Once she turned to coaching, she founded the Balkan Judo Sports Club in 2014. She later worked as a lecturer at Trakya University and coached the Turkish women's judo national team. Her daughter followed her into judo and, in early 2026, transferred to the Galatasaray judo team.