Serbija ecstatic after second world title at cadet worlds

The world title for the girls U70kg was captured again by Serbija, the second this championship and the second ever after Boris Rutovic won the gold medal one day earlier in Zagreb. In the final Andric and Turkish Tuana Gulenay didn’t waste any time, attacking and positive, looking for early scores. Andric went in first but was caught with a lovely sukashi for waza-ari, answered almost immediately with a massive ashi-guruma for waza-ari and then an osoto-gari for another. Aleksandra Andric (SRB) is the new cadet world champion at U70kg.

Number one seed Shavon Gonzalez (USA) applied a fast and decisive shime-waza in round two to lay her claim to a confirmation in the ranking. However, Uzbek Afsalova wasn’t accepting the nomination to lose. Having already beaten Canada’s Bourque and Croatia’s Miljevic she was warm, up to speed and got the job done.

At the top of pool B was Navickaite (LTU), also high in the world rankings but also beaten, falling out of the competition. In that quarter it was Serbian athlete Andric who made the cut, to face the Uzbek in the semi-final.

On the bottom half of the draw the seedings were fully respected with Gulenay (TUR) and Oliinyk-Korniiko (UKR) reaching their respective semi-final perfectly. The Ukrainian was particularly impressive through the morning, with an uchi-mata anyone would be glad to have in their repertoire.

Gulenay, though, was able to overpower the Ukrainian and push her way into the final. She had a close call against American Chloe Williams earlier in the day and that seems to have been fair warning to switch on and so she did.

Gonzalez had the chance to fight again in the repechage but being unable to find her form she lost to Dutch powerhouse Van Lijf, who then moved forward to face the technical excellence of Oliinyk-Korniiko.

Van Lijf came into the contest with a plan and she was determined to execute; leading every exchange, attacking first and surviving well in ne-waza. It was a good plan and she won in golden score, 3 penalties to nil. The Dutch fighter almost couldn’t believe it, thrilled to be a world medallist.

The second bronze medal was contested by Afsalova and Italian Mengia. Mengia was another who fell against the Ukrainian but as that was in the quarter-final, she then managed a repechage win in order to give herself a final chance at a podium finish.

This was a much faster medal contest with the Uzbek applying a perfectly timed shime-waza inside the first 30 seconds. It was impressive.