Three British debutants ready to make a statement in Baku

The British team will have three World Championships debutants. However in fact none of them are strangers Chelsie Giles, Jemima Yeats-Brown and Stuart McWatt are invited to upset the elite as much as they can.

Coventry judoka Chelsie Giles might be making her World Championships debut in Baku. The 21-year-old fought at the 2017 European Judo Championships in Warsaw, Poland where she made the round of 16 before losing to Kosovo’s Olympic champion Majlinda Kelmendi. The four-time British champion won her first Grand Prix medal in Antalya in April. A second Grand Prix medal followed in August with bronze in Budapest. Giles claimed a big scalp in the bronze medal contest as she beat three-time World Championships medallist Andreea Chitu (ROU).

Jemima Yeats-Brown -78kg is always an exciting watch with her “honey badger don’t care” approach to fights. The Ryecroft judoka’s World Championships debut comes six years after making her European Championships debut in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The former Junior World bronze medallist moved up to U78kg in May this year at the Hohhot Grand Prix and she has already made an impact at her new weight. In only her second competition at U78kg she won bronze at the Saarbrucken Senior European Cup. At the Budapest Grand Prix Yeats-Brown secured some of the biggest wins of her career to date with wins over then WRL 6 Marhinde Verkerk (NED) and WRL 16 Luise Malzahn (GER).

Garioch Judo Club’s Stuart McWatt will be making his World Championships debut just over a year after a returning from a second ACL surgery. The Scottish middleweight finished his Junior career last year with a bronze at the Junior European Team Championships and a fifth at the Junior World Championships. McWatt has made a solid transition to Senior competition in 2018 with seventh place finishes at the Dusseldorf Grand Slam and Zagreb Grand Prix. The 21 year old has also won gold medals at the Saarbrucken and Bratislava Senior European Cup this year.