World Champion Hikari Yoshioka left Japan for the first time

The second day of the Cadet World Championships learned us that the European athletes are strong in the category U48kg but today there was one factor throwing our trend away, Hikari Yoshioka of Japan. The tiny lightweight captured the gold medal in Almaty and stepped into the footlight of former senior world champion Ami Kondo who won this cadet category in 2011.

In the first final of the day Hikari Yoshioka faced Croatian Ana Viktorija Puljiz, or what is the same, the 31^st of the World Ranking against the number 7. Yoshioka left Japan for the first time in her young career and fought athletes she had never met before from other countries. Yoshioka has discovered that the rest of the world have a different style and adapted to another style succesfully.

The public expected anything but not an osae-komi by the Japanese thirty seconds after the start to mark waza-ari. And they expected even much less another osae-komi fifteen seconds later to conquer the title without suffering. It is what is called an immediate adaptation.

Italian youngster Assunta Scutto won the first bronze medal, winning against the Turkish Buketnur Karabulut with a waza-ari marked when there were 39 seconds left.

In the second fight for the bronze, the victory went to the Hungarian Anna Kriza, who surpassed the Brazilian Nascimento by ippon a few seconds from the end, a second medal for the successful Hungarian girls.