Mayra Aguiar still going strong

Although she is already 30 years old (and going to be 31 soon), Brazil’s triple Olympic bronze medalist and double World Champion Mayra Aguiar is still in top form, judging from her good performance in the recent 2022 Tbilisi Grand Slam.

Although she only had three matches in the competition, she fought extremely well in the two matches leading up to the final.

In her first match, against Mariam Tchanturia (GEO), which was the quarterfinal, she executed two very impressive techniques. The first was a double-stab kosoto that took the Georgian down for waza-ari. Then she did her trademark drop tai-otoshi for waza-ari-awasete-ippon.

That took her into the semifinal, against her old rival Audrey Tcheumeo (FRA), who is also veteran campaigner herself. It took Aguiar about two minutes to finish the match by launching the French player with a massive uchimata at the edge of the mat.

In the final, Aguiar got caught early on in the match with a nidan-kosoto-gari by 2021 World Champion Anna-Maria Wagner of Germany. She spent the rest of the match trying to even the score but the German player managed to ward off all her attacks.

Although she did not win the gold, Aguiar showed that she still has a lot of fight in her and her techniques are still as sharp as ever.