Tournament Report

The Pirate Olympics

53 fencers, A2 event.

A very bottom heavy A2 event. Over half of the fencers were Us and many of them were pretty much novices. But it was still a real fun tournament. They also held a team event and a one touch single elimination event. The main event ran very smoothly. The team and one touch had some jitters but that is to be expected. Although three of us went, we did not field a team. Tom hurt his hand during the event and wanted to take his wife out to eat, and we didn't rally someone else. If I had tried I could have gotten onto another team but when they made the final announcement for close of team registration I was reffing a quarter final bout I think.

Over all I did well. I ended up in 16th. Went three and two in a six man pool. which sounds better than it was. I could nitpick myself here because I really didn't fence that well in most of my bouts. but I won't. I'll be happy with what went well.
I fenced a DE bout with Charles Cory who, like most people I have coached, is always difficult for me. Charles had an awesome pool. he went 5 and 1 including taking Bruce Vail to overtime. So he had a much higher seed than I. He jumped out ahead of me at first with his usual long looping lefty counterattacks to my outside arm. I was able to neutralize his counters with a timing change taking advantage of a mistake he was making. that got me back on top before he fixed his mistake. The I spent the rest of the bout literally arguing with myself about trying the move again.
But I did convince myself to obey the rules and not go back to something that had stopped working. Then to finish off the bout I finally clicked on to how to stop the looping outside counters cold. I finally popped the correct parry for a second intention hit. Things went well. I was then eliminated by David Hueske (he got me last year at this event too) Hueske went on the final four and renewed his B.

I heard a fencer commenting that Miles Bengston was the best fencer a the event by far. He said, "no offense to Bruse, Bruce is really good, but Miles has got this" Well, the final score fothe first place bout was Vail 15 Bengston 3. Although Bruce did comment to me afterwords that Miles was "Going to be really scary in a couple of years"

Over all it was a very nice event. Too bad our more novice epeeists didn't make it.