Sin Hombre wrote: ↑Fri Oct 26, 2018 12:52 am
Pooja finished 5th in the Asian Games and the 2 bronze medalists from that event were here and failed to medal. But the North Korean wrestler who won gold as well as the Chinese who won silver were both missing.
The North Korean looks to have gone down to 55kg at this tournament and the Chinese up to 59, and they both won bronze at those weights.
Missing completely is the Nigerian who beat her in the finals at the CWG earlier in the year.
Pooja did beat that Nigerian Odunayo here. I think that was her best win here. But, she also had a couple more very good wins.
But, thanks for reminding that Asian gold and silver medalists moved to other classes here. They may come back to this weight class for olympics. Chinese may not because there seems to be a stronger Chinese in 57 who won gold here. But, there may a 2-3 others from Europe/North America who may do likewise.
As of now, Pooja may be anywhere between 3-8 positions in 57. Hopefully this success will boost her morale and she will do better now. She certainly seems to have talent.
As expected, no medals in Greco Roman. Bad performance here with 2 out of 10 wrestlers winning a round and none going to even rapachages.
So, we end up with 2 medals at this world championships where we had none last year. I would take 2 medals at olympics from wrestling although competition will be slightly tougher.
Ravi Kumar wins the Silver, the first medal for India in this ongoing World U23 Wrestling Championship ... He lost in the final against superior the Japanese wrestler, Toshihiro Hasegawa ... Before the final, Ravi scored couple of good wins against Uzbek and Romanian wrestlers.
At 2018 World U23 Wrestling Championship, Bucharest, Romania
Freestyle Men U23 - 57 kg - Gold Medal match Ravi Kumar (IND) l Toshihiro Hasegawa (JPN) 0-6
[SF] Ravi Kumar (IND) bt Jahongirmirza Turobov (UZB) 10-8
[QF] Ravi Kumar (IND) bt Taras Markovych (UKR) 12-4
[R16] Ravi Kumar (IND) bt Razvan Marian Kovacs (ROU) 7-5
That was the only medal which we won at the under 23 world championships. A bit disappointing on womens side, where none of the women even got into bronze medal matches. Even in mens freestyle apart from silver medalists Ravi Kumar, none could reach bronze medal match.
The other encouraging performance came in greco roman. In 77 kgs, Sajan reached SF but later lost narrowly in both SF and bronze medal match to finish fifth. Sajan is a two time world junior medalists winning bronze last year and a silver this year a couple of months ago. Looks like we have finally got a greco wrestler who can win bouts at this level and go deep in draws. He needs to kept an eye on in next couple of years when he transitions to seniors.
Apart from badminton, good news on coaching front in wrestling too. There was an article which I had posted in October that 3 foreign coaches set to join. It seems government did not approve of that at that time. It seems finally at least the American women's team coach has arrived.
“I think we have the capability to put all six girls on the podium come 2020,” he says. “The team should be considered a Top 3 team in the world by the time we go into 2020. We should be the team to beat- we can pass the USA, Japan, China and all these teams that are slightly better.”
This appears a bit exaggerated and marketing talk by a new coach coming in. But, even if he is able to achieve some part of that it will be great.
In the meantime, olympic gold quest has got Hungarian coach Wöller Ákos as personal coach for Vinesh Phogat. Bajrang already has the Georgian Shako Bentinidis as personal coach.
Now, only hope that the Iranian coach who was supposed to join as mens freestyle coach comes in. That will ensure that we lack nothing in terms of coaching for wrestling preparing for Tokyo.
I like people talking up the prospects of our team. They have to believe that they can be top-3. Or whatever. And the coach can try to help them get there. Sometimes such talks inspires people to show that their coach's belief in them is actually correct. So, all power to the coach.
Negativity and pessimism is under the purview of the non-PKB-type people on sports forums. We don't want the coach to break out monopoly
Number of our wrestlers are taking in part in Dan Kovlov-Nikola Petrov ranking series tournament in Bulgaria this week.
And it is a very good performance so far by our top 2 - Bajrang in mens 65 kgs and Vinesh in women 53 kgs. have both reached the final in their respective categories. Bajrang beat 2 wrestlers from Russia and another from Belarus to reach final. He will meet USA's Michel Oliver in the final.
Vinesh beat wrestlers from Uzbekistan and USA in first 2 rounds and had an excellent win by pin against USA's world championships silver medalist Sarah Hildebrant in the semi final. She meets Chinese Peng in final tomorrow.
Sandeep Tomar, Sakshi Malik and Pooja Dhanda also won medals here but they were all in the non-olympic weight classes where the competition was not tough. Bajarng and Vinesh's performances were in a tough field.
Bajrang destroyed American Michel Oliver 12-3 in the final at Dan Kovlov.
This domination at this level of competition is amazing. Apart from that world championships final loss against Otaguru, Bajrang has been unbeaten in last 1 year and has swept titles at 4-5 tournaments including CWG and Asiad.
Vinesh lost in a final against the Chinese world #3 Pang. She was leading 2-0 with about a minute left but Pang brought her down and rolled her over 3 times towards the end.
Anyway, good performance by Vinesh in her new weight category.
Hope everybody has noticed that Dhruv has now added a sharing facility the posts, which we had requested. I have not tested it all, but feel free to share our posts here to your social media.... Mod, Jay
Asian wrestling championships began today in Xian,China. 5 weight categories of mens freestyle were completed today.
As expected, Bajarang Punia followed up his Asian games win with an Asian championship title today. He was trailing a strong Kazakh wrestler 2-7 around midway thru the second session and then in the last 1 and half minutes, just took apart the Kazakh to win 12-7.
Bajrang did benefit though for absence of Japanese world champion Otoguru who had beaten him in the world championships final.
1 silver and 1 bronze too for us today with Pravin Rana in 79 kg and Satwart Kadian in 91 kg- both non-olympic classes.
If we compare this with Asian games performance, we had only 1 medal - gold from Bajarang in mens freestyle from 6 olympic weight classes. In same weight categories, we had 1 gold (Bajrang),1 silver (Amit Dhankar) and 3 bronze medals ( Deepak Punia ,Satywart Kadian and Sumit).
So, there is good improvement. Very difficult to see anyone among these to be olympic medal hopeful though other than Bajrang. From longer term perspective, Deepak Punia is our best prospect here along with Ravi Kumar in 57 kg who narrowly lost the bronze medal bout. Both are about 20 and medalists at junior world level. If they continue to improve like they have been they will be medal contenders at senior level but mostly not at Tokyo olympics.
Decent success for us at the Asian championships in women and greco roman too.
We got 4 bronze medals in womens - Vinesh,Sakshi Malik,Divya Kakran and Manju Kumari. Except for Manju, other 3 are in olympic weight classes. Vinesh lost to the Japanese eventual gold medalist in the semi final but beat a strong Chinese wrestler ( whom she had lost to in an earlier competition 2 months back) in the bronze medal match. Overall, Vinesh does appear to be in top 8 wrestlers at least in her weight category.
In greco roman, we got 3 silvers and a bronze which is an improvement over Asian games where we did not get any medal. Hoepfully, few of the greco wrestlers will qualify for Tokyo.
Another international tournament and another title for Bajrang Punia. He wins gold at AliAliyev international tournament in Russia. He beat 2 powerful Russian wrestlers in the semi final and final both coming from behind in the second period. He has been virtually unbeatable since last 1 year with only loss coming in the world championships final against the Japanese Otoguru.
Next up for Bajrang is Beat the Streets event at Madison Square Guarden where he will meet the US national champion this weekend. The details are in this article-
