MADRID, 15 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Olympic medalists Sandra Sánchez and Damián Quintero will lead the Spanish delegation that will participate from this Tuesday until next Sunday in the Karate World Cup, which is held in Dubai and where Spain will try to exceed the bar of the ten medals achieved in the Championship of the Madrid World 2018.
The talaverana, gold in the kata modality at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, will try to endorse the world title won three years ago in the Spanish capital and defend the ‘Triple Crown’ to expand a magnificent record that also includes six consecutive European champion titles (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021).
Also on Thursday, Quintero will face his assault on World Cup gold to crown a 2021 in which he has hung two silvers in the Olympic Games and in the European. In 2018, he lost in the final to the Japanese Ryo Kiyuna, his executioner also in Tokyo.
In total, 28 athletes, including karatekas and parakaratekas, will seek to improve the loot of 10 medals – one gold, three silver and two bronze in karate and two golds, one silver and one bronze in parakarate – from Madrid.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the individual kumite qualifiers will begin, in which Seck Babacar, Fernando Delestal, Samy Ennkhaili, Carlos Bargados and Lander Orbea will participate in the men’s team and Nadia Gómez, Carlota Fernández Osorio, Indira Zúñiga, Adriana Gil and María Torres in the feminine.
Friday will be the time for the kata teams, which took two silver in 2018 and which this time will be made up of Sergio Galán, Alejandro Manzana and Raúl Martín and Lidia Rodríguez, Raquel Roy and María López Pintado, and the kumite teams -in the male, all of the individual table plus Alfredo Domínguez and Xavier Santos and in the female, all except Nadia Gómez-.
Precisely, the women’s kumite team, which faces the appointment with a new national coach, the former world medalist Irene Colomar, will try to equal or improve the bronze of Madrid, and the men’s also has a new coach, the former world champion Iván Leal.
In parakarate, Carlos Huertas and Víctor Manuel Prieto (intellectual disability), Fran Lozano (visual disability) and Juan Antonio Sepulcre and Vicente Yánguez (wheelchair) will participate in the men’s team and María Ester de León and Lucía Sánchez (intellectual disability) and Isabel Fernández (wheelchair) in the female.