Doukkali wins Morocco’s first Grand Slam gold
Hassan Doukkali had entered fourteen World Judo Tour events without reaching a podium. On 30 October in Abu Dhabi, at the fifteenth attempt, the 24 year old from Morocco skipped the bronze and silver stages entirely and won U73kg gold at a Grand Slam, the first of its kind for a Moroccan man. He was seeded sixth, beat opponents from Romania, France, Georgia and Russia on the way, and found a final block in which none of the top four seeds had survived. A draw opens like that once in a while; the judoka who walks through it is the one who was ready.
Ready is the word, because the results had been pointing here for four years without quite arriving. Seventh at the Junior World Championships in Guayaquil in 2022. Seventh at the Grand Prix in Portugal and fifth at the Grand Prix Upper Austria in 2023, the year he won the Warsaw European Open. Fifth again in Upper Austria in 2024. African champion in 2025. And in 2026 before Abu Dhabi: winner of the African Open in Casablanca, runner up at the African Championships and the Mediterranean Games, seventh at the Grand Slam in Ulaanbaatar and fifth at the Grand Prix in Lima. Four fifth and seventh places on the Tour is the profile of a man who keeps losing the bronze contest. In Abu Dhabi he never had to fight one.
What Morocco had before Doukkali
Moroccan judo is not new to results; it is new to this kind of result. Adil Belgaid collected African titles and top eight finishes at World Championships in the 1990s and early 2000s. Safouane Attaf won African titles, was fifth at the Junior Worlds on Jeju Island in 2002 and took a Grand Prix bronze in Amsterdam in 2011. On the women’s side Assmaa Niang won Grand Slam bronze in Ekaterinburg in 2019. The juniors have been visible too: Ayman Elhoussaini and Zouhair Esseryry in the top eight at the 2017 Cadet Worlds, Chaimae Eddinari at the 2018 Junior Worlds, Oulaya Khairi and Esseryry again at the 2019 Junior Worlds in Marrakech. Continental success has been steady. World Tour success has been isolated, one bronze here, one there, with years in between.
The test is what comes next
Doukkali is the clearest case Morocco has of a junior top eight athlete turning into a senior winner, and the ranking agrees: he jumped from eighteenth to tenth in the world in a single weekend. The harder question is whether he stays alone. A federation becomes a judo nation when its athletes reach final blocks on the Tour and World Championship top eights as a habit rather than an event, and that pipeline does not yet exist behind him. For now Morocco has something it never had before, a Grand Slam champion at U73kg, and a reason for the next Elhoussaini or Eddinari to believe the step is possible.
Back to the overview