Ryu Shichinohe exposes himself as best contender of Riner

In the last category of the Grand Prix Dusseldorf SHICHINOHE Ryu (JPN), who is currently the main contender to threaten Teddy Riner, was expected to enter the final, which he easily did after his victories against Jean-Sebastien BONVOISIN (FRA), Feyyaz YAZICI (TUR), Or SASSON (ISR) and Sven HEINLE (GER). In the final he faced his teammate, OJITANI Takeshi, who cleaned out the second half of the draw as world bronze medallist Faicel JABALLAH (TUN), KIM Sung-Min (KOR) suffered early defeats.

The final took place between two athletes who perfectly know each other and therefore cancelled each other out. The difference was only made by the penalties and it is not the last attempt of OJITANI to throw SHICHINOHE, who changed the score. The world silver medallist will definitely be one of the rivals of Riner in the upcoming months and years.

The German team had two extra chances to add bronze medals to the host country delegation prize list, as Andre BREITBARTH (GER) and Sven HEINLE (GER) were in contention for a place on the podium. In the upper part of the draw, BREITBARTH faced Or SASSON (ISR), but after less than a minute he was already one waza-ari behind as SASSON produced his effort to send the German to the floor with a left handed morote-seoi-nage.

The second bronze medal fight opposed HEINLE to Oleksandr GORDIIENKO (UKR). After leading by a yuko after more than three minutes of fight, the German combined a ippon-seoi-nage with a ko-uchi-gari technique to score waza-ari and to take the lead, to give a last bronze medal to Germany for a total of six bronzes and one silver for the host nation.