Sophie Williams Blog

European championships, Denmark

I have just returned from the Junior European Championships in Denmark. The competition was probably the toughest it has ever been. The entry was small, only around 40 people. However it was only the very top nations in Europe who attended, which meant the early round was incredibly difficult. I prepared well, despite my tough draw, but in the poule it just proved to be slightly too tough and I narrowly missed going through to the next round as I only won one out of five fights. I then had to watch as the other fencers from my poule went on to do very well in the competition.  The Ukrainian in my poule went out to the German from my poule in the last 16.  The latter subsequently went out in the quarter finals, as did the Polish girl also from my poule. The Italian in my poule went on the win the competition, so although my result was disappointing, there are plenty of positives I can take away from my performance.

With the individual competition out of the way, it was time to focus on the team event. As neither of my British team-mates did that well in the individual, we were bottom of the rankings going into the team event and drew the number 1 ranked team, Hungary. Although they were the favourites, I felt that if we tried hard enough we could put up a good fight. A team event is a relay up to 45 hits, with fencers swapping at 5 hit targets (i.e. first to 5 hits, then first to 10 hits etc) with each fencer in the team fencing all the fencers in the other team. I was on first fight against Anna Varhelyi, which I won 5-1. I think this made Hungary sit up and realise that this fight wasn’t going to be easy for them. The fight was close all the way to the end. I also beat Dora Damu 10-3, to regain the lead mid fight. All of the team fenced well and as I went into the last fight we were 40-38 up. I then had Kata Varhelyi, Anna’s younger sister and a previous world champion. She stepped up a gear which I couldn’t quite get to and she won the fight for Hungary 45-40 in the end.

We then had to play off for places and had Russia almost immediately. None of us really got into the fight and we lost 45-20.  We then had to fence Iceland for 7th or 8th place. We won the fight confidently and so finished 7th overall, an improvement on our original ranking.

The European Championships this year may not have gone the way I planned, but I feel that for the first time we are starting to put ourselves on the international circuit as serious competitors that other nations need to watch out for.