Cuban Judo: Paris Was Not a Party

The Paris of a century ago was quite a party for Ernest Hemingway, but for Cuban judo it was very far from that, in its competitive debut of the season in the Grand Slam of the City of Light, which marked the beginning of the section this weekend decisive to complete the tickets for next summer's Olympic Games in the French capital.

As we wrote a few days ago, this is one of the most important events to score points in the World Ranking, which will grant 17 places in each division, without repeating the country of origin, and most of ours were outside that privileged list.

Very close were our main hopes for summer medals: Iván Silva (90 kilograms), Magdiel Estrada (73), Maylín del Toro (63) and Idalys Ortiz (+78), with Andy Granda (+100) practically assured.

However, on the Parisian matress the only one who was able to add an appreciable number of units was Maylín, finishing seventh in her category, after falling in the play-off against the Mongolian Gankhaich Bold, who was nevertheless below her in the rankings.

Magdiel lost in the second round against the Argentine Facundo de Lucía, who was surpassed in his next match and did not pull him, he does not even appear in the IJF ranking and he had not competed on the circuit since March last year, when he left the Open held in Rome without  a win.

The others were surpassed by superior rivals, and in the case of Ivan, he lost to Greek Theodoros Tselidis, who is in his same rank, while Idalys did not compete.

Result in terms of ranking? Granda arrived on position five and was eliminated by the Kazakh Yerassyl Kazhybayev, number 37, so he could go down a few steps, and the rest were in places 21 to 35, from where Maylín perhaps stepped up some. This is currently speculative because the IJF has not updated the list after this event, which may undergo drastic changes.

The classification in the 60, 66, 81 and 100 kgs for men and 48, 52, 57, 70 and 78 for women is still very complicated, and the route in these cases we still think is the Pan American tournament.

In any case, this was just the beginning of the World Tour events, with a closing date of June 23, 2024, and we still have the Grand Slams of Baku (February 16-18), Tashkent (March 1-3), Tbilisi (March 22-24), Antalya (March 29-31), Kazakhstan (May 10-12) and the Abu Dhabi World Championship (May 19-23), in addition to other Grand Prix category in which Cuba regularly participates.

There’s still a way to go and each fight is important, not only to get the pass, but also a good position in the draw under the five hoops, since classifying just barely is almost synonymous of early elimination.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff