Miklos Cirjenics grabs gold in attractive final U100kg

The U100kg weight category at the Grand Prix in Zagreb proposed a particularly high level of top class judoka, but surprisingly the top three athletes of the category, Elkhan Mammadov (AZE), Elmar Gasimov (AZE) and Varlam Liparteliani (GEO) were eliminated during the preliminary rounds opening the road to less well ranked athletes to reach the final, which opposed the explosive Jorge Fonseca (POR) and Cirjenics Miklos of Hungary.

The first in action was Fonseca with his homemade seoi-nage for a superb waza-ari, very close to ippon, but something was missing to produce one of the throws of the competition. The Portuguese was then penalised for stepping out of the tatami and again a few seconds later. The least that can be said is that the amount of power that was developed on both side was enormous, but at the end, it was Cirjenics who attacked, then was counterattacked by Fonseca, but luckily left his foot inside the legs of the Portuguese to throw him with a ko-uchi-gari for ippon.

The first bronze medal contest opposed another world class athlete, Karl-Richard Frey (GER) and Giuliano Loporchio (ITA), who was already medallist in Croatia in 2013, but that was when the Grand Prix was held in the city of Rijeka. Loporchio was penalised twice and Karl-Richard Frey, even if he couldn’t score seemed to have full control over the match, being more powerful and more dominant than his opponent. But in judo one must score to win and that is what Loporchio did a few seconds before the end of the bout to snatch the medal from Frey.

The second bronze medal match could have been a final of the world championships as Varlam Liparteliani (GEO), current Olympic and world silver medallist was opposed to Elkhan Mammadov (AZE), the current European Champion and former world champion. After 50 seconds of mutual observation, both athletes were penalised with a shido. Halfway to the end, a second shido was given to the two champions, meaning that no more mistakes were allowed. But Mammadov made one more as he deliberately pushed Liparteliani outside of the competition area and therefore received a third and last penalty. Liparteliani won his ninth medal on a Grand Prix.