The Women’s Epee World Cup 2011 at Barcelona concludes – Fencing Recap
The 35th Trofeu Internacional Ciutat de Barcelona took place from March 11-13 with the Women’s Epee discipline for the seventh consecutive year at the venue Institut Nacional d’Educació Física de Catalunya (INEFC) in Barcelona.
The first day comprised of the individual Women’s epee rounds from preliminary pools to top 64. In these rounds, the most outstanding female fencers among all belonged to the nations Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Ukraine, Russia, Switzerland, Romania and
USA.
Estonia, Switzerland and Venezuela also managed to stand equal among the World ranked Italian, Ukrainian, French, German and Chinese female epeeists among the top 64 fencers of the event.
However, in the next rounds that took place on March 12, the stronger contenders that reached up to the top 8 were Simona Alexandru from Romania, Josephine Jacques Andre Coquin from France, Anqi Xu from China, Ana Branza from Romania, Kristina Kuusk from
Estonia, Yana Shemyakina from Ukraine, Loredana Iordachioiu from Romania and Yujie Sun from China. It showed a clear dominance held by the Romanian and Chinese females.
These fencers were respectively paired up to compete against each other in the quarter-final round. Among these, the closest fight took place between Xu and Branza with a single-point win followed by Iordachioiu and Sun with a two-point difference at the
end of the bout.
The four epeeists to qualify for the semi-final bouts were Alexandru, Branza, Shemyakina and Sun.
The two semi-final bouts were found to prove opposites of one another. One was a head-to-head fight between Shemyakina and the Chinese Sun with a single winning point scored beforehand by Yana at 14-13. On contrary, the other was an obvious single-handed
victory by Branza over her compatriot Alexandru at 15-8.
Final combat was more or less a tough fight where surprisingly Romanian fencer edged ahead in score against Shemyakina, winning with a two-score lead at 15-13 and picking up the gold medal. Shemyakina collected her silver followed by a bronze-medal share
between the Chinese Yujie Sun and Romania’s Alexandru.
Later, the Women’s epee team event took place on March 13 in which 24 countries participated with their four-member teams. The automatic byes were awarded to eight teams namely, Romania, Germany, China, France, Italy, Korea, Poland and Russia who got a direct
entry in the top 16 round.
In the next elimination rounds, the three teams who potentially knocked out the automatic-bye nations from heading into the top 8 round were Ukraine, Hungary and Estonia, leaving behind the defeated China, Russia and Poland respectively.
Estonia single-handedly conquered over the Korean team, qualifying for the top 4 with a 45-28 score. The other three quarter-final bouts were very exciting, where Romania, Germany and Ukraine managed to take the solo win-point over their respective opponents
Hungary with 37-36, France with 39-38 and Italy with 45-44.
Uniquely, the two semi-final competitions were obvious ones where Germany amazingly took over the Romanian team 27-22 and Estonia trounced the Ukrainian females 45-37.
The final bouts were a treat to watch, where both teams were under pressure with the scores going head-to-head after every few seconds. Finally, Estonia clinched their gold on defeating Germany with an amazing 45-42 win. Germany deserved their silver followed
by the bronze decider match between Ukraine and Romania. Conclusively, the bronze was taken up by Ukraine on defeating Romania 39-36.
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