Inal Tasoev wins fifth gold for Russia

Tthe heavyweight men’s division was again dominated by the Russian team like most of the men’s categories in Budapest. Again it led to a Russian final with Inal Tasoev and Tamerlan Bashaev. The giant against one of the smallest athletes in the heavyweights. With two gold medals already, prior to the last day of competition, Russia could still mathematically be caught, but after Sunday’s demonstration, no other country had a chance to pick up the gauntlet.

What a pleasure to see the heavyweights do ne-waza effectively and spectacularly. This was the case with Inal Tasoev in the final match of the event, after the failure of Bashaev's dropping seoi-nage technique. Tasoev immediately dived to turn his opponent over and immobilise him. Good work.

During the bronze medal contest between Gela Zaalishvili (GEO) and Jur Spijkers (NED), we saw something interesting. As Zaalishvili had just thrown his opponent and ippon had been called by the referee, the Georgian remained focused and took his opponent with an immobilisation, in case the ippon was changed to waza-ari; a wise reaction from him as we never know for sure. In this case, the ippon was valid.

In the second bronze medal contest, Or Sasson (ISR) seemed to have done the hardest work by continuously attacking Levani Matiashvili (GEO), but only seconds from the end, the Georgian scored a small but sufficient waza-ari by countering the Israeli, to join on his compatriot Zaalishvili on the podium.