Women's Epee Grand Prix in Havana concludes: Fencing News
The Women's Epee Grand Prix ended in Havana yesterday, May 22. The competition was held at the Pabexpo Exhibition Hall in Siboney, Playa and only featured the Women's Epee Individual event.
A total of 128 female fencers participated from 25 different nations in the Cuban Grand Prix. Out of these, the French side emerged as one of the finest at the competition. Out of a total of eight, seven cleared the preliminary round.
The event had been sponsored by the International Fencing Federation (FIE) and featured world’s top-class female epeeists like Magdalena Piekarska from Poland and Imke Duplitzer from Germany.
Two of the French fencers, Maureen Nisima and Laura Flessel, had directly appeared in the top-16 due o their top FIE ranking at third and sixth, respectively. Stephane Riboud, the French coach made a good selection of fencers for the Grand Prix on
viewing that five of them fought their way into the top-64 round.
However, Melissa Goram, Sarah Daninthe, Maureen Nisima and Laura Flessel Colovic made it into the top-32 direct elimination round.
In this round, Goram faced-off the Polish star Piekarska and was shamefully defeated with 15-4. Moreover, Daninthe confronted a head-to-head fight against the Swedish Emma Samuelsson, but failed to take up the winning points and got defeated at a 15-14
score gap.
Nisima gave a good fight to her Chinese counterpart Sheng Lin, but was overpowered by her opponent with a defeat at a close 8-7. Flessel was also beaten down in the same round after a face-off against the Italian Mara Navarria with 15-13.
All these defeat meant that no French epeeist could make it into the next qualifying rounds. However, the quarter-final round was equally dominated by Italy and Romania, with two fencers each battling in the top-8 list.
In the semi-final round, all the four fencers belonged to different nations that heated up the environment at the Grand Prix venue.
Germany’s Monika Sozanska had a tough fight against the Russian Lubov Shutova and won the lead-score at 13-12, qualifying into the final round.
On the other hand, Romania’s Simona Alexandru fought against the Italian Bianca Del Carretto, but was beaten down with 12-10.
The two finalists battled their way towards clinching the gold medal, however, the golden hit was taken up by Italy’s Carretto at 10-9, sealing the top podium place for herself whereas Sozanska was left with a silver-medal victory.
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