Double Olympic heavyweight champion Teddy Riner won the Paris tournament on Sunday for the eighth time, a record which perfectly launches his year less than six months before the Olympic Games. The 34-year-old Frenchman, who won in the final against South Korean Kim Min-jong, made his return to the tatamis in individual competition, nine months after his eleventh world champion title in Doha, Qatar. In six months, on August 2, Riner could add a third individual coronation to an already extraordinary record. In the meantime, he fulfilled his contract in front of his thousands of fans at Bercy, where he was the favorite, and scored important points in the Olympic rankings with a view to being seeded at the Olympics.
Major opponents absent
The way was clear for the French champion. His main potential opponents at the Games, like the Japanese Tatsuru Saito or the Russians Inal Tasoev, with whom he shared the gold medal at the 2023 Worlds, or Tamerlan Bashaev, against whom he lost at the Tokyo Games in 2021, n were not present in Paris. The Tajik Temur Rakhimov, current world No.1, or the Finnish Martti Puumalainen, European champion in Montpellier in the absence of Riner, were not lined up either.
The star even had to work hard, notably in the semi-final against 25-year-old Uzbek Alisher Yusupov, current 3rd in the world and bronze medalist at the 2023 Worlds. Riner was scared, a time virtually eliminated before the Uzbek ippon was demoted to a single point (waza-ari) after video refereeing. The Frenchman, trailing, ended up winning by ippon. In the final, against the South Korean whom he faced for the first time, Riner had his only overtime fight of the day. Against this left-hander who was smaller than him, a profile he feared, Riner finally won after 24 additional seconds.
Riner started the day by taking out the Kazakh Galymzhan Krikbay, disqualified after three penalties in 2 min 28, then the South Korean Jaegu Youn, mowed down in just 42 seconds. In the quarter, he pinned the 22-year-old German Losseni Kone to the ground after 2 min 32. At the Arena Champ de Mars this summer, the Frenchman, who won in 2012 and then 2016, will aim for a third individual Olympic title, a feat until now. there only achieved in lightweight by the Japanese Tadahiro Nomura (1996, 2000 and 2004). Riner also won team gold in 2021.