Manuel Lombardo knows the highs and the lows

Italy’s Manuel Lombardo has seven IJF World Tour gold medals and a European Championships gold medal as well. But he has twice come up second in the World Championships.

In the 2021 Budapest World Championships, he made it to the final of the -66kg division where he faced Japan’s Joshiro Maruyama. They had fought once before, in the quarterfinal of the 2019 Dusseldorf Grand Slam. There, Maruyama threw him with uchimata for waza-ari. In Budapest, Lombardo was able to thwart Maruyama’s uchimata attacks but succumbed to the Japanese player's yoko-tomoe-nage, which was done off an uchimata feint. The score was only waza-ari but it was enough to win Maruyama the match.

Then, in 2023, in his new weight category of -73kg, Lombardo faced Switzerland’s Nils Stump, whom he had never fought before. It was a very close match, with neither player able to throw the other. Then, in Golden Score, Lombardo launched into a strong ippon-seoi-nage that had Stump airborne (though he managed to land on his front). Lombardo’s head had briefly touched the mat and based on the rules at the time, he was given a hansoku-make for head diving.

Lombardo has been to the Olympics twice and he’s had even less luck there. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, he lost to relative unknown Adil Osmanov of Moldova in the bronze medal fight. And at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, he lost the bronze medal fight to An Baul of South Korea. He has three more years to gear up for the next Olympics.

At 26 years of age, Lombardo is still going strong and is currently No. 3 in the IJF World Rankings. Two players ahead of him are Hidayat Heydarov of Azerbaijan, the reigning European, World and Olympic champion; and Tatsuki Ishihara of Japan, who got silver in the 2024 World’s. Lombardo has fought Heydarov four times and has beaten him three of those times, although the last time they fought (at the 2023 Tokyo Grand Slam), it was Lombardo who lost. Lombardo has fought Ishihara only once, at the 2024 Paris Grand Slam, where he also lost.

Heydarov and Ishihara are probably the two biggest hurdles for Maruyama to overcome in the coming months. Will he be able to beat them in the lead up to the World Championships this year? And will he be third time lucky and finally win a World gold?