World No. 1 Rishod Sobirov retained his men’s world under-60kg title to deny Japan a clean sweep of the gold medals on the first day of the World Judo Championships at the Palais Omnisport de Bercy on Tuesday.
Sobirov scored a half-point waza-ari eight seconds from the end of the final against Japan’s Hiroaki Hiraoka with a bear-hug leg-sweep counter (kosoto-gake) to win his seventh major tournament in a row.
Hiraoka said afterwards he had been forced into an attack he didn’t want to make by Sobirov’s pressure.
Photo: EPA
“I didn’t want to make an attack at this time, but his gripping was so strong he forced me to try,” he said.
Azerbaijan’s Ilgar Mushkiyev and former world champion Georgii Zantaraia of Ukraine won the bronze medals.
The real drama came in the semi-final against Kim Won-jin in which Sobirov’s 18-month unbeaten run was almost ended.
Photo: EPA
The Uzbek took a decisive lead a minute from the end of the contest when Kim was given a penalty, but the South Korean then hit back immediately with an inner-hook (ouchi-gari).
The referee originally awarded the maximum winning ippon score only for the judges’ table to overrule him and downgrade it to a waza-ari.
It still meant Kim was leading, but one second from time Sobirov scored his own waza-ari with a rear throw (ura-nage) to snatch the victory by the earlier penalty.
Japan’s Masashi Ebinuma upset the odds to win the under-66kg title, beating Brazil’s Leandro Cunha in the final.
World No. 8 Ebinuma scored a perfect ippon with a textbook inner-thigh throw (uchi-mata) to beat the man who sits one place above him in the standings.
More importantly for him, though, was the fact that he matched compatriot Junpei Morishita’s exploit from last year in Tokyo, particularly given only one fighter from each country can go to the Olympics.
“This victory was not my goal, the Olympics is my goal and now finally I am level with Morishita,” Ebinuma said. “I was so disappointed last year and since then I’ve been training really hard and that’s why I got this result.”
South Korea’s Cho Jun-ho and Russian world No. 4 Musa Mogushkov took the bronze.
In the women’s competition, Haruna Asami ensured Japan topped the medals table after the first day of competition as she beat compatriot Tomoko Fukumi for the second year in a row in the under-48kg final.
Asami notched the only score of the fight with an inner-leg sweep (ouchi-gari) for the minimum yuko score 30 seconds from the end of the contest.
It means Asami is in pole position to go to the Olympics, but she isn’t counting her chickens.
“I really wanted to win this second world title and now I have achieved that desire,” she said. “I didn’t smile because it’s not my goal, that’s next year in London.”
“I won this tournament, but I don’t think I’m guaranteed the place at the Olympics, the competition between Fukumi and me is very close,” she added.
It was Fukumi’s third world final in a row having won in Rotterdam in 2009.
Young Brazilian star Sarah Menezes and Hungary’s Eva Csernoviczki won the bronze medals.
In the men’s under-66kg division, there were shocks aplenty earlier in the day as world No. 1 Khashbaatar Tsagaanbaatar of Mongolia and 2010 champion Morishita both bit the dust.
Tsagaanbaatar was narrowly beaten in the last 16 by Cho, while Morishita injured his elbow in the third round as he was trying to resist an armlock by Moldova’s Igor Soroca.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier