Ryunosuke Haga lifts his performances to gold

Ryunosuke Haga captured the gold medal at the Grand Prix of Dusseldorf. The only favorite present in the final was the number 8 seeded, Ramadan DARWISH (EGY), who during the preliminaries defeated Jorge FONSECA (POR) and Lyes BOUYACOUB (ALG), before taking advantage over the world number 2 and top seeded athlete, Cyrille MARET (FRA) and NAIDAN Tuvshinbayar (MGL), the 2008 Olympic champion in the semi-final. The last stage of his already successful competition was against the 23-year-old athlete, HAGA Ryunosuke (JPN), who recently won the European Open in Rome.

After a very good competition day, Ramadan DARWISH probably expected more than what he was able to demonstrate in the final. While struggling for the gripping, he could not avoid the quick o-uchi-gari of HAGA for yuko, the Japanese immediately following to the ground with a simple but efficient turn-over and an immobilisation for ippon. This victory gives the chance to HAGA to add a gold medal won on the occasion of a Grand Prix, after he already collected bronze and silver in the past years.

Cyrille MARET (FRA) who definitely came for the title, could only enter the final block for a bronze medal against CHO Guham (KOR) and he looked exhausted at the end of the day. But the waza-ari that the French scored with a counter-attack for waza-ari was enough to secure a place on the podium.

In the second bronze medal fight, two great names of the category Henk GROL (NED) and NAIDAN Tuvshinbayar (MGL), had to face off to decide who would step on the podium. Less active than his opponent the Dutch athlete was penalized with a shido for passivity, and looked unlikely to throw his opponent. But luckily for him, NAIDAN made a mistake by attacking without enough control, GROL did not miss the occasion to throw him with a counterattack for waza-ari. Once again the Dutch champion steps on an international podium.

It must be noted that several other favorites had difficult competition days as Karl-Richard FREY (GER), bronze medallist in Chelyabinsk last summer, Elkhan MAMMADOV (AZE), 2013 world champion, Maxim RAKOV (KAZ), 2009 world champion and Dimitri PETERS (GER), Olympic bronze medallist, did not enter the final block of the competition.