Montreal, August 25, 2015 (Sportcom) – It was a short day for Canadian judokas on Tuesday at the World Championships in Astana, Kazakhstan. Antoine Bouchard was eliminated in the second round in the Under 66kg class, while Ecaterina Guica, fighting in the Under 52kg, was stopped in her first match.

“It ended a little too quickly for my taste,” admitted Bouchard, defeated in his second bout of the day by world’s 9^th-ranking judoka, Azerbaijani Nijat Shikhalizada.

“We fought about a month and a half ago, and the match was pretty one-sided in his favour,” said the Saguenay athlete, 16^th in the world. “This time, my game plan was to be more aggressive on his hands, but I made a mistake and he managed to score,” added Bouchard..

He was caught by surprise by a waza-ari when he was launching a counterattack. “He managed to get the best of me,” he mentioned. “I didn’t think his technique would be so powerful.”

In the opening round, Bouchard, who turned 20 on Monday, disposed of Zambia’s Mathews Punza, 291^st in the world. “It’s not always so easy to fight someone who ranks so much lower than you, because there’s so much pressure to win,” he said.

Punza drew first blood with a yuko, but it didn’t take long for Antoine Bouchard to react, settling the dispute with an ippon. “The fact that he scored first woke me up, and I scored in the very next sequence. It was a good first match to get me into the competition.”

On the women’s side, Montreal’s Ecaterina Guica, 30^th in the world in the Under 52 kg, was up against Mongolia’s Tsolmon Adiyasambuu, 26^th. Three yukos tipped the scale in Adiyasambuu’s favour.

On Wednesday, the Maple Leaf will be represented at the World Championships by Catherine Beauchemin-Pinard (Under 57kg), Étienne Briand (Under 73kg) and Arthur Margelidon (Under 73kg).

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