Fifth day at Austria’s 2011 European Cadet Championship: Fencing News
The fifth day of the 2011 European Cadet Championship (ECC) took place on March 4 in Klagenfurt, Austria. The day comprised of two team's events namely Men’s sabre and Women’s epee weapon discipline.
A total of seventeen nations participated in the Women’s epee team event, each team comprising of four members, three active and one stand-by fencer. Almost all teams were holding an automatic bye to the top-16 tableau, except for Spain and Slovakia Republic, who played off a bout in order to make it into the top-16.
As a result, Spain comfortably defeated the Slovakian women fencers and secured the only top-16 seed vacancy.
For qualifying into the top-8, France and Great Britain witnessed a very close fight against each other where France took the victory on beating down the British fencers by a two-hit difference at 45-43.
In this event, women fencers from four nations were found dominating the advanced rounds of the event namely Italy, Hungary, Romania and Poland. Poland defeated Israel with a score win of 45-41, whereas, Hungary faced a head-to-head fight with Germany at 45-44 for stepping into the top-4.
Similarly, the Hungarian fencers were given a cut-throat competition by Italy in the semi-final bout where it lost by just a single-hit win at 44-45, losing its chance to head into the finals. The other finalist to qualify for a confrontation with the Italian women was Poland after defeating the Roman epeeist team.
Even though the final bout was a close one, but Poland lost its golden chance on getting trounced by the Italian perfectionists. It was no less than a surprise that both the team events were overtaken by the Italian male and female fencers just like the previous team event day, winning the final round of both Men’s sabre team and Women’s epee team carried out that day.
The Men’s sabre team event featured fourteen nations with a total of 56 fencers as participant. Among all, Russia was found very strong, making it to the final bouts against the Italian men fencers. The Russian team included the gold-medal winner of men’s sabre individual, Alexander Trushakov and Alexander Baranovskiy the bronze-holder, who got painfully beaten up by Italy. This Italian team, featuring the silver medal-holder Luca Curatoli and bronze medal sharer Leonardo Affede, defeated Russia with a terrible margin of 45-21 score points in the Men’s sabre team finale.
On the other hand, the play-off was played among France and Germany for clinching the bronze medal. It was an unpleasant surprise to watch the German team, with 5th and 7th ranked individuals, lose from the lower ranked French sabreurs, including the 17th ranked Mehdi Fabre and 20th ranked Tom Seitz. France single-handedly took the bronze after defeating to Germany with a 45-28 score gap.
The next events of the Fifth European Cadet Championship that took place on March 5, also included two team events namely Men’s foil and Women’s sabre.
That day’s top spots were also a solitary success for the Italian teams that had comfortably added-in one gold medal and one silver medal that took the total count to seven gold wins for Italy followed by four silvers and four bronzes, occupying the top spot with the highest number of medals earned in the cadet championship.
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