In the Lima Grand Prix, European, World and Olympic Champion Hidayat Heydarov suffered a humiliating first match defeat to an unknown junior player from France. He totally redeemed himself in the Guadalajara Grand Prix, where he won all his matches by ippon and ended the final match with a crowd-pleasing throw.
In his first match, against Valtteri Olin (FIN), Heydarov opened up the account with his trademark driving kata-guruma for yuko. Then, he finished off the match with a stylish Huizinga Roll turnover into a hold-down. He also used newaza in his second match, pinning Justin Lemire (CAN) with a yoko-sankaku hold-down in the first minute.
Heydarov once again used his trademark kata-guruma in his semifinal match, against Andrea Pariche (VEN) to score waza-ari. He immediately followed up with a newaza exchange that lasted very long. But the referee let it go on because there was progression. At one point, it looked like he was going to get juji-gatame but then he switched it to a hold-down and pinned his opponent for waza-ari-awasete-ippon.
Having used newaza to score all his ippons in earlier matches, Heydarov ended his day with a brilliant reverse seoi-nage, in Golden Score, to throw Chusniddin Karimov (CZE) for ippon. The crowd roared its approval. Heydarov is back!
Blog posts
Distria Krasniqi (KOS) was the queen of the -52's in Zagreb. She won all her matches by ippon, There was no one even close to her.
Team USA got a total of 3 golds, 9 silvers and 5 bronzes. The three gold medalists were Christoper Velazco at -60kg, Daniel Liubimovski at -100kg and Mariah Holguin at -57kg.
An overview of the winners from Day 3 of the Zagreb Grand Prix, including the performance of American players.