SAMURAI Judo Club made it a clean sweep of medals in the 66 kilo category at the 61 Open Championships at High Wycombe.

Harry Ashen, Loic Keasey and Martin Allen were all in the under 66 kilos category at the under-16 event.

At just 11-years-old Harry Ashen could have been out of his depth but instead he battled through to the semi-final.

Loic, who turned 13 just a month before, was also up against older players but he too had some good wins, including a superb maximum point foot sweep throw against a player only days away from his sixteenth birthday, to also reach the semi-final and a match against Harry.

Both of these players took gold at the British National Championships last year in their respective age groups, but the expectation was that Loic would edge the contest. Nevertheless, Harry gave him a good contest, but another excellent throw from Loic finished the match and gave him a place in the final.

On the other side of the draw, Martin Allen had three good wins to put him into the final against Loic.

Martin is the oldest of the three players and so had the edge in power but Loic was thoughtful, tactical and put up a tough fight.

However, Martin finally caught him with a footsweep to take the gold, leaving Loic with silver. Harry won the bronze play-off to make it a hat-trick of medals for the Samurai club.

In the lower grade girls, Sophie Davis had some good wins on her way to a bronze medal.

Elsewhere, Olivia Turner added another medal to her growing collection of international medals with bronze at the Eernegum Open in Belgium, near Bruges.

As is often the case with Olivia, being just over 70 kilogrammes and the weight category for her age band being over 70 kg, she was up against some massive girls, including some French and Belgian girls who were around 100 kg.

The bronze is her 36th national or international medal, which puts her seventh on the Samurai’s all time national and international medals list; she needs five more to chase down Debbie Read in sixth place.