Sophie Williams Blog

Back from the World Championships

So a couple of weeks ago I returned from my first senior World Championships in Sicily. I feel that I learned a lot from the experience and definitely can improve upon my performance here before heading into the second half of the Olympic Qualification period.

I was very nervous before the initial round of poules and I think this held me back a bit and so I struggled to find my rhythm. Fortunately I still fenced well enough to get a reasonable result of 3 wins and 3 losses, which meant I had to fence Gonzalez (Mexico) to reach the round of 64. I was still dealing with nerves and this made me very tense, but I just managed to squeeze a victory 15-14.

I knew I was fencing Besbes (Tunisia) in the 64, and now I had two days to prepare for it. She is ranked in the top 10 in the world and by no means an easy match, but I felt I had some good ideas going into the match and that my nerves wouldn’t hold me back. The day came and I felt as prepared as I could be, but unfortunately her experience was too great and I lost 15-7.

Although I feel I could have fenced better in the individual event, I wasn’t too disappointed with my result. But now it was on to the team event. In the first round we had to fence Australia and we had a relatively comfortable win against them. But we knew we had to raise our game if we were going to put in a good performance against Italy in the next round. Italy were a tough team and we couldn’t quite keep up to their pace and lost.

Now we had to fence for places 9-16. Our first of these matches was against Tunisia; this was our best match and we won very easily (and I beat Besbes 5-0 this time). We were into the 9-12 play-offs with Korea. We fenced well, but a couple of small errors were all it took and they narrowly won 45-42. Our last match for 11th place was with Spain, who we have fenced before and lost to twice in recent competitions.  We weren’t going to let that happen again and despite a close start to the match, we pulled away to a good victory.

The World Championships were an eye opener for me.  I now feel like I have a more directed approach to my training and know where I need to make my improvements. I’m looking forward to the next few months training and then getting back into the Olympic Qualifying competition at the beginning of next year.