Japan has already announced that Uta Abe would be its -52kg representative in the 2026 Baku World Judo Championships. Uzbekistan has yet to announce its roster and there is much speculation about whether 2024 Olympic Champion Diyora Keldiyorova will be making her comeback there.
For sure, Keldiyorova has been training. But she has yet to compete in any tournaments.
Abe also took a long break after her disastrous performance in the 2024 Olympics where she crashed out in the preliminary rounds after being thrown by Keldiyorova for ippon.
But she returned to competition in February 2025 to win the Baku Grand Slam. Since then, she has won the 2025 World title and the 2025 Tokyo Grand Slam gold. More recently, she won gold at the 2026 Ulaanbaatar Grand Slam.
A potential rematch of their Olympic showdown in the 2026 Baku World’s would be the most hotly anticipated match-ups.
To date, they have fought only a total of three times. The first time was at the 2019 World Championships, when Abe threw Keldiyorova with a sode-style osoto-gari for ippon in the preliminary rounds. After that, they met in the final of the 2023 Doha World Championships. There, Abe pinned her for ippon.
In their Olympic match-up, Abe was ahead by waza-ari with only one minute left in the match when Keldiyorova struck with tani-otoshi for ippon. That defeat left Abe literally shrieking in tears afterwards.
Keldiyorova, who is now a mother, has returned to training since April. But she has not announced when she will return to competition.
“If I can regain my sporting form, I may try to compete at the Asian Games,” she said. “If I do not make it in time, I intend to take part in a competition after that.”
The Asian Games will begin on September 30. The competition after that is the World Championships, which will begin October 4.
It’s highly unlikely that Keldiyorova will compete in both, since the dates are so close to each other, although anything is possible.
If she chooses to go only for the Asian Games, she will not meet Abe as Japan’s representative for that competition is Kokoro Fujishiro. But if she chooses to go for the World’s, there is a good chance she will meet up with Abe, who has been chosen by Japan for that one.
Usually when champions make a comeback after a long absence, they don’t do so well immediately. Olympic Champion Yeldos Smetov made a comeback at the recent Qingdao Grand Prix and he did not medal there. But who knows, Keldiyorova might defy expectations, like in Paris 2024, and produce another big surprise.
