Spotlight on Manuel Lombardo

Manuel Lombardo is one of the top players from Italy. When he was fighting at -66kg (now he’s moved up to -73kg). Last week he was training at the OTC at Papendal in the Netherlands and seemed to have good fun going deep as a preparation on the IJF Masters in Budapest in August. The World number two of Doha rose quickly in his category. Interestingly, Lombardo’s teammate, former Olympic Champion Fabio Basile, has decided to move back down to -66kg. A Lombardo-Basile match-up would have been interesting too. But that's not going to happen either. Oon Yeoh analysed Lombardo for us.

He was one of the few players who could really threaten Hifumi Abe of Japan. These two have fought two times and officially, it’s 1:1 but many would argue it’s 2:0 in favor of Lombardo. At the 2019 Paris Grand Slam, Lombardo stunned Abe by throwing him twice with side takedown for waza-ari-awasete-ippon.

They met again at the 2019 Tokyo World Championships bronze medal match. There, Lombardo countered Abe for what looked like an ippon. Indeed, the referee had scored it an ippon but the video judges overruled that call. Abe subsequently threw Lombardo and won the match. But if you watch the replay of that counter, it’s hard to conclude it’s anything but an ippon. Many judo observers still feel that Lombardo should have won that match.

Lombardo has since moved up to U73kg so there is no prospect of a third match-up between him and Abe. He’ll have to fight Soichi Hashimoto instead. These two have never fought before so it will be interesting to see how that turns out. Hashimoto is more of a classical player while Lombardo is rather unorthodox, so it will definitely be a clash of styles when they meet.

Lombardo’s main technique is the side takedown (some call it drop kata-guruma) which he can seemingly pull off from any angle and from different situations. He is very versatile with it and it’s hard for his opponents to stop it. He’s certainly one of the best side takedown exponents today (Amandine Buchard of France is another one). He is also very good and confident at groundwork, especially with the kata-gatame roll.

He is currently ranked No. 5 in the world and is one of the most exciting prospects for the gold medal in the Paris 2024 Olympics.

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JudoInside's JudoCrazy partner, Oon Yeoh, is creating interesting content such as this series of articles about Olympic judo history. Support his efforts by subscribing to his Patreon or Substack.

Support JudoCrazy

JudoInside's JudoCrazy partner, Oon Yeoh, is creating interesting content such as this series of articles about Olympic judo history. Support his efforts by subscribing to his Patreon or Substack.