Havana, April 1 (JIT) - Cuban Ivan Silva (90 kg) climbed the podium at the Antalya Judo Grand Slam 2024, with a bronze medal, in what was Cuba's best performance. 

He started with a hard-fought victory over Germany's Eduardo Trippel, who dodged the fight all the way to the hansoku-make in added time.

He then dispatched Dominican Robert Florentino with a waza-ari in the final moments of the bout. Silva tried to avoid another golden rule extension by throwing himself into a sumi-gaeshi sacrifice and succeeded.

Perhaps fatigue from the effort of his previous bouts took its toll on him in the quarterfinals against Azerbaijani up-and-comer Vugar Talibov, the 2018 Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games champion and world runner-up in that category in 2023.

Talibov took revenge for his loss to Silva in that same instance during the Baku 2024 Judo Grand Slam, in barely a minute. After 10 seconds he counted waza-ari by seoi-otoshi shoulder technique and shortly after it ended with the Cuban completing the waza-ari-awasete-ippon.

The Baku 2018 world runner-up had to suffer another marathon bout in the repechage against French Maxime-Gael Ngayap, recent bronze medal winner at the Paris 2024 Judo Grand Slam. After more than six minutes of sparring he was able to knock him down with o-uchi-gari for waza-ari, after having a similar technique invalidated a couple of minutes earlier.

Thus it came to the discussion of one of the bronze medals against the Uzbek world champion and bronze medalist at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Dalvat Bobonov. In that trance he showed extraordinary physical strength. Both engaged in a memorable fight in which they scored a waza-ari each, but the matancero finished off with ippon to climb to the podium, all in less than three minutes.

Lianet Cardona (78 kg) had an even fight against Korea's Shu Hsu Wang until, with a few seconds left in the bout, she succumbed to the ko-uchi-makikomi that enveloped her and meant the decisive waza-ari. 

With no time on the clock, she could not reverse the advantage and conceded in her first submission, so she still awaits her first grand slam victory.

Idalys Ortiz (+78 kg) was unable to defeat French Lea Fontaine. She got into penalties that cost her the defeat by hansoku-make. That prevented her from advancing from the first bout in round of 32.

Andy Granda (+100 kg) suffered in the same phase against Slovak Marius Fizel. In his first appearance he was surprised against the youngster, whom he won the bronze medal dispute in his previous appearance at the Tbilisi 2024 Judo Grand Slam.

With just four seconds left in the bout, he held a waza-ari advantage, achieved with seoi-otoshi technique. However, he succumbed to the European's o-soto-otoshi, which tied the actions and forced the golden rule, in which he got an ippon that left the world champion of Tashkent 2022 on the way.

Japan's Murao Sanshiro (90 kg) won the fifth gold medal for Japan; also crowned were France's Madeleine Malonga (78 kg), Julia Tolofua (+78 kg) and the stellar Teddy Riner (+100 kg), who lifted his tenth grand slam title, and led France to the second place by countries. 

Canada came in third, followed by Portugal with the gold medal won by Jorge Fonseca (100 kg), then Korea, Austria and Moldova. 

With one title, one runner-up and two bronze medals, Russia would have been in third place, but is barred from participating as a federation by the IJF.

With the medal won, Cuba moved up to 20th place out of 93 participating nations.