Our special correspondent at the Accor Arena
Clarisse Agbégnénou did it. Still frustrated with her 7th place – accompanied by two defeats – during the European Championships in Montpellier last November, the double Olympic champion from Tokyo absolutely wanted to show a different side this Saturday during the Paris Grand Slam. A competition with multiple challenges for her, even if her selection for Paris 2024 had been made official at the end of November. Gaining confidence, marking your opponents, taking points to move up the rankings and have a more affordable field at the Games… It’s difficult to go around. But the determination she displayed all day speaks louder than words about her extreme motivation six months before the Games…
Apart from her entry into action against the German Agatha Schmidt, dismissed on ippon after two minutes of combat, the whole day was a pain for the six-time world champion, who undoubtedly wanted, and needed, that, to test herself, to dig deep within herself. With as a masterpiece her round of 16 against the Japanese Megumi Horikawa, the one who won the world title in 2022 when she was in the middle of maternity leave. Between the two judokates, the duel was very intense, a real and exciting opposition of styles that Clarisse Agbégnénou was able to win after more than eight minutes of golden score, on a third penalty inflicted on the Japanese, lifted from the tatami a few moments before by the French woman before managing to turn around like a cat to land on her stomach, not her back. But despite his remarkable resistance, Horikawa ended up giving in in a fiery atmosphere. As the Frenchwoman’s following opponents would experience it…
But each time, the solution was difficult to find. Thanks to a waza-ari at the very end of the fight, Clarisse Agbégnénou dismissed the Cuban Maylin Del Toro Carvajal in the quarter-finals, not without some scares from opposing offensives. In the semi-finals, again she had to resort to the golden score before throwing the Dutchwoman Joanne Van Lieshout to the ground after 7 minutes and 50 seconds of an intense fight. And the Frenchwoman was not at the end of her Herculean labors with in the final a young 21-year-old Croatian, Katarina Kristo, who would also push her to play overtime before raising her arms in victory on a waza -ari after 5 minutes 54 of combat. Proof, already, that six months before the Games, little Athena’s mother is already in good shape physically and mentally.
