Daniel Lascau foresees most medals for top 8 seeds in Tokyo

Daniel Lascau was World Champion in 1991. He was born in Romania. He went to West Germany and became World Champion U78kg. He won many European Club championships with Abensberg. After his career he became general Secretary and Sports Director at EJU and IJF. President of the Romanian Judo Federation and now he is IJF Sport Director and Acting Refereeing Director.

Lascau is the first person to offer predictions for the Olympic Games in Tokyo and with the target event still so far away, he spoke generally at first and was then brave enough to point out a few names for us. Are you excited to know these names?

Firstly, we received some statistical information. “One of the key points is, that around 25 countries will win medals. Traditionally around 10 medals go to Japan, 4-5 to France and the third top country is Russia, in terms of winning medals.” According to former world champion Lascau, there are also strong countries like South Korea and Italy who are likely to be in the mix.

As there is always a competition between continents, our spokesman mentioned that most of the medals go to Asia and Europe. At the Olympics in London 75% of the medalists were top 8 seeded and in Rio four years later 87.5% of the medalists were seeded. “Therefore, the probability of getting a medal if you are not a top 8 seed is 0.5 – 1 medal per category.”

The probability of getting a medal is bigger if the athlete has won a World Championships before the Olympics. In this case, winners of Budapest, Baku and Tokyo Worlds will have more chances of winning at the Games. However, there are categories where we have all of the top 10 athletes taking part and each of them is capable of earning a gold medal.

We should not forget, these are the Olympic Games. Everything is possible here and we should expect surprises. Experienced rostrum-dwellers Will have their moments, but there are newcomers too. We should expect a new name to become a superstar, maybe even more than just one.

Coming to the names, “I would like to put it this way, there are a few big names and it is quite hard to beat them. Daria Bilodid, Ono Shohei and Teddy Riner are three athletes I will highlight, but the most exciting part of the Olympics, sport and especially judo is, anyone of the big names can lose on that particular day.”

Talking about surprises of the Olympics, we asked about the biggest ones for Lascau. “London’s Olympics brought us Lasha Shavdatuashvili from Georgia and Fabio Basile was the surprise of the Games in Rio.”