Havana, March 4 (JIT) - Ivan Silva's fifth place (90 kg) was the best Cuban performance at the Tashkent Judo Grand Slam 2024, which came to an end this day.

In his first appearance he emerged victorious in just over a minute over local Azizbek Avazmuradov, who was decreed the hansoku-make for a landing technique with the head prohibited in this sport.

That same recipe was applied to the Lebanese Caramnob Sagaipov in just 13 seconds of combat, so he reached the quarterfinals with the minimum effort.

There, the Russian Mikhail Igolnikov was waiting for him, who took two shidos from him before showing an excellent repertoire with which he took out two waza-ari twice in less than a minute, to decree the waza-ari-awasete-ippon. First an o-uchi-gari technique in which he showed leg strength and then attacked the Cuban's head with a koshi-guruma move that gave him the victory.

Silva redeemed himself in the repechage and surprised in less than a minute the Romanian Alex Cret, with an excellent execution of ko-soto-gake that literally laid him on the tatami to get the ippon.

This gave him the opportunity to fight for the bronze medal against the Uzbek world champion and Olympic medalist Davlat Bobonov, who had prepared an ambush for him and projected him in just 15 seconds with a spectacular uchi-mata that the referee did not hesitate to decree ippon.

That left him without the possibility of climbing the podium, but the fifth place gets him valuable points for the Olympic ranking in which he is in qualifying positions.

Andy Granda (+100 kg) could not defeat Japan's Hyoga Ota in his first outing and fell by hansoku-make after three shidos in less than three minutes. He could not revalidate the bronze medal won in the previous edition of this tournament in 2023. Ota was finally crowned champion of the event.

In the same way Idalys Ortiz (+78 kg) fell against the Portuguese Rochele Nunes, when the referee stopped the bout with six seconds left, which seemed too rigorous to many, and applied a shido for passivity to both that meant the hansoku-make for the Cuban for being the third one for the same reason.

The multi-Olympic and world medalist still retains qualifying places for Paris 2024, but lost an opportunity to add a higher amount to improve her position. 

Greece's Theodoros Tselidis won the title in the 90 kg division. Also winning their divisions were Uzbekistan's Muzaffarbek Turoboyev (100 kg), Japan's Rika Takayama (78 kg) and China's Xin Su (+78 kg), in addition to Ota.

France retained first place by country with three crowns. It was followed by Japan and Uzbekistan, in that order, with two. Cuba ranked 25th among the nearly 70 participating nations.