The Judo World Cups in Tashkent showed that Jorge Fonseca is human and therefore makes mistakes. It took the Portuguese judoka a few more hours to process the failure and admit that he was in seventh place and was not sparing himself. With the same frontality with which he has been on the top podium in the last two World Championships, the Portuguese explained why he was not at his best mentally despite being 100% physically.
He was a two-time world champion (2019 and 2021), Olympic bronze medalist in Tokyo 2020, leader of the ranking and thus the main favorite for gold in Tashkent, but ended up falling off the podium, after two wins and two defeats through “his own fault”, as he admitted. First, still in the quarterfinals, he lost to Azerbaijani Zelym Kotsoiev, 11th in the world, who would become a bronze medalist, and then, when he was relegated to the playoffs, he fell to Georgian Ília Sulamanidze (sixth) .
“It was greed. I felt good, I was fine. I’m not old enough to make these little mistakes anymore. I was winning by waza-ari, two minutes to go, I could do it completely differently. I wanted to finish the fight immediately, with my strong technique, but I had a counterattack,” explained the 29-year-old judoka.
If in the fight with Kotsoiev he was lost in the referee’s indication and was surprised by the Azerbaijanis, in the second he let slip an advantage that he himself had, even before the middle of the fight: “I got frustrated, the way I was countered. When I noticed he was already immobilizing me and there was no way to get out. It was the last straw, I didn’t expect him to get caught like that and I didn’t expect him to come out of my favorite technique because he was well placed, I didn’t have the necessary explosion.”
The “greed to end the fight” led him to defeat and to a “huge disappointment”. The judoka confessed that he was “a little lost with things that had been going on lately”, including not having been to the police, but refused to use it “as an excuse”. However, he confessed to the “great pain” of having learned via television that he had failed a police entrance exam. He who “wanted to close everything” at the World Cup, but couldn’t. And not only did he not join the PSP, he did not retain the world title: “It’s a snowball I can’t even handle, but I also believe I have a brilliant career in judo ahead of me.”
And if anyone has provided proof of overcoming, it was Jorge Fonseca. “I’ve been through so many things in life that I don’t go down. I overcame cancer, then I became world champion, I went down many times, I got up, that’s the life of an athlete, ups and downs. I give not on i am not one to give up so easily i am 29 years old i have to walk a lot to get hit and hit, now it’s knowing what went wrong, trying to correct small mistakes and go to the next world championship and get better. Gold or bronze, but I want to be on the podium,” the Sporting judoka said, admitting that he would like to take a break before betting everything on the Masters – an annual competition that brings together the best in each category – to heal the “wounded ego”.
Source: DN
