World Junior Championships: Team USA Overview

The World Junior Championships were held in Lima earlier this month. The USA fielded 17 players and managed to secure a bronze medal. 

The best result came from the Men’s -60kg category, with both of its players making it to the repechage stange, and with one of them winning the bronze medal. Christopher Velazco defeated his first two opponents with ouchi-gari and yoko-shiho-gatame but became unstuck when he faced the Japanese player Retsu Matsunaga who threw him with seoi-otoshi. Jonathan Yang, meanwhile, defeated his first opponent with an armlock, then threw his second opponent with a drop sode and kosoto-gari. He was thrown with an unorthodox seoi-nage by Samariddin Kuchkarov from Uzbekistan. 

Velazco and Yang faced each other in the repechage. In a long, drawn-out match that went into Golden Score, and lasted slightly over 14 minutes, Yang won with an ura-nage that scored waza-ari.


Yang then overcame Zacharie Dijol of France, to win the bronze medal, although it was actually a very close shave. Dijol threw Yang in the final seconds of regular time and waza-ari was given by the referee. Dijol, who had already clamped on a sankaku on Yang, decided to release him from the hold once the bell rang because he thought he had already won. But as it turned out, the waza-ari was overturned. Yang made full use of his second lease on life in Golden Score, and attacked aggressively, finally throwing Dijol with a very low seoi-otoshi for waza-ari slightly after the 9-minute mark. 

The men’s -100kg player Daniel Liubimovski made it to the repechage but lost to his Russian opponent there. Two players, Daniel Shulgin at -81kg and Oleksandr Nyzhnyk at -90kg won their first matches but lost their second matches. Four of the players lost their first matches: Lenny Sheynfeld at -66kg, Kai Wallace at -73kg, and Kanta Ueyama as well as Rufus Alexander Ferguson II at +100kg.

Over on the women’s side, four of its players got past their first matches but then lost their second ones: Iya Sadanchikova and Malia Manibog in the -48kg division, Harlee Hiller at -52kg, and Emily Daniela Jaspe at -63kg. Four players lost their first matches: Mackenzie McPherson at -52kg, Chloe Williams at -70kg, Jayda Fulp at -78kg and Rhadi Ferguson at +78kg