Japan’s Rei Higuchi received the boys’s freestyle wrestling 57-kilogram gold medal earlier than countrywoman Tsugumi Sakurai claimed the rostrum’s high spot on the identical weight within the girls’s occasion on the Paris Video games on Friday.
The 28-year-old Higuchi, silver medalist on the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Video games, got here from behind to defeat Spencer Richard Lee of america 4-2 within the dying seconds of the ultimate on the Champ-de-Mars Area.
“It was not a straightforward street. I misplaced quite a bit, was disqualified from the weigh-in (within the Tokyo Olympics qualifying spherical), and skilled a variety of frustration and despair,” Higuchi mentioned.
“I received the gold medal due to so many individuals…There have been individuals who thought I used to be the strongest on this planet and cheered me on. I’m very comfortable to have been capable of reply their name.”
Higuchi, recognized for his fast one-leg tackles, turned the primary Japanese man to win a title within the lightest weight class since Takashi Kobayashi within the 48-kg class on the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Japan’s Rei Higuchi celebrates after defeating Spencer Richard Lee, of the United State, of their males’s freestyle 57kg closing wrestling match, at Champ-de-Mars Area in Paris on Friday. Picture: AP/Eugene Hoshiko
It was redemption for the Osaka Prefecture native who didn’t qualify for the Tokyo Video games in 2021 after failing to make weight.
Tied 2-2 after overcoming a two-point deficit within the first interval with a leg sort out within the second, Higuchi twisted Lee down by the waist earlier than deftly flipping him to attain two factors because the clock ran out.
“I am grateful to my household for all of their endurance. I fought at a really excessive stage right here. This was a terrific match for me,” Higuchi mentioned after the medal ceremony.
Sakurai, 22, a three-time world champion making her Olympic debut, beat Anastasia Nichita of Moldova 6-0 to say the title.
She follows within the footsteps of four-time Olympic champion Kaori Icho and Tokyo Video games winner Risako Kinjo, whom she beat in a nationwide choice match en path to punching her ticket to Paris.
“I used to be not too nervous and stayed relaxed as normal. I heard a variety of cheers, and I loved my matches very a lot,” Sakurai mentioned.
Japan took its gold medal tally to 5, with two bronze, to steer the wrestling medal standings in Paris.
It received two golds in Greco-Roman, whereas a dominant victory by Akari Fujinami within the girls’s 53-kg class on Thursday prolonged her profitable streak to an outstanding 137 bouts since junior highschool.
In earlier motion on Friday, Daichi Takatani booked a spot within the males’s 74-kg freestyle closing with a hard-fought 20-12 victory over American Kyle Douglas Dake, a bronze medalist on this class on the Tokyo Video games.
The 29-year-old Takatani, making his first Olympic look, will face Razambek Salambekovitch Jamalov of Uzbekistan in Saturday’s closing.
Sakura Motoki additionally moved into the ultimate within the girls’s 62-kg class, getting back from the brink of defeat with a back-bending sort out for a technical fall of Grace Jacob Bullen of Norway and can face off in opposition to Tokyo Olympic bronze medalist Iryna Koliadenko of Ukraine on Saturday.
Down 7-2 within the second interval, Motoki tossed her opponent over her shoulders to grab the win.
Motoki, the 2023 world silver medalist at 62 kg, is bidding to increase the Japanese girls’s title streak on this weight class that goes again to the inaugural girls’s wrestling match in 2004.
Though Tokyo Olympic champion Yui Susaki suffered an upset within the first spherical at 50 kg and received bronze right here, Japanese girls have received wrestling gold medals in six consecutive Olympics because the 2004 Athens Video games.
If the remainder of the ladies win, together with Motoki and Yuka Kagami, the 2023 world champion at 76 kg, they are going to have 4 gold medals, tying the document haul set in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and Tokyo in 2021.
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