I have never been so glad to get on a plane and come home. That venue, while beautiful, was not the kind of place I would ever want to stay for a week.
My odyssey started last Friday, July 3rd. I worked all day at the Statue of Liberty setting up for GMA, came home to finish packing and sleep for 3 hours, then headed back to the Statue for the show. Went over to my coach's apartment, crashed for a half hour or so then over to JFK. By the time I got
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So, once again, I've been negligent. I haven't written an entry in over a month. In my defense, I have been pretty busy. Not entirely because of fencing, though. I'm working part time with ABC, doing the Good Morning America concerts among other things. This Friday/Saturday I'm setting up for a show from the Statue of Liberty, as a matter of fact I'll be working Saturday morning, then catching a couple hours sleep before heading to the airport to leave for nationals.
I was ridiculously tired all day but managed to go 5-1 in the pool (lost 5-4 to a Mexican guy), then won 4 DE's to get to the finals: Joshua Chang, Louis Poulin-Langlois, Andrew Gurovich and Etienne Picard.
Down 12-8 fencing Andrew Stetsiv, I came back to 14-14 by avoiding his parries in the middle and instead concentrating on defense. When it got to 14-14 I wasn't nervous at all, because I knew exactly what to do- fake and pull him short. Under no circumstance
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I'm actually going to fence IA this year at summer nationals, mostly because I want to get that stupid A09 that I don't really need because of points, but I still just want to get it to have done with it. So... I had to qualify at senior sectionals in Maryland.
It was a really small sabre event, which was strange considering foil and epee were both pretty big. We had 12 people, so two pools of 6. My pool had Alex Guo, Eugene Chung, Dmitri Kopylov, Richard Brown and Wes Morrow. I went 5-0, go
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My first NAC ever going in as top seed in my pool, my goal for Portland was to go 6-0.
I had a shorter than usual layover on the trip out, going JFK-SFO, about an hour layover, then SFO-PDX. Of course, I was delayed getting out of JFK and by the time I got to SFO, there was about 30 minutes until I had to be on board the next flight. Not a problem, except it turned out my flight left from a different terminal completely, for which I had to go out of the airport, walk around, go back in and g
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I just had a busy fencing weekend, competing on both days. On Saturday, the NYAC held a team competition. It wasn't very well attended, but we managed to put together 4 teams from the NYAC/MFC fencers who came out:
NYAC I
Ben Igoe
Jeff Spear
Mike Etropolski
NYAC II
Myself
Vassil Etropolski
Richard Cohen
Jerry Liu
MFC I
Tim Morehouse
James Williams
Matt Zich
MFC II
Daryl Homer
Alejandro Rojas
Sean Buckley
We ran it as a round robin of 45 touch team matches. First matc
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Instead of going down to the Cherry Blossom, I decided to stay in New York and go to what seemed to be a very strong open at the Fencer's Club. There were 10 A's signed up on askFred, probably not enough to end up with an A4 though. Actually, when registration closed, several of the A's were no shows so the tournament would only be an A2. It still looked to be a pretty strong event though.
The pools were all self-reffed, which I was pretty disappointed with, considering the steep entry fee (
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The last Mercury Cup took place yesterday (Sabrage). I wasn't planning on taking it too seriously, so I didn't alter my practice schedule or anything like that, but I did bring my competition electric stuff to give it more of a serious feel. I wanted to at least fence to 100% of my ability for the whole day.
As usual for a mixed event, the pools were ridiculously unbalanced. I had McGough, Pochapin, Suna, Maldonado, Mattison, and Russell. I went 6-0, good indicators, tied me for 2nd seed, we
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Yea, I know I quit and everything. I did this more as a favor to my old coach than anything else, since they were short on sabre refs. This was a MACFA meet at NJIT.
I only did sabre all day, except for two double stripped foil bouts. It was low stress but high on the ugly fencing factor. I swear, the better NJ high school teams could beat most of these college teams. Multiple times after a simultaneous action I could only wince and shrug, say simultaneous and start agai
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I got an email today saying that the USFA can't process my FIE license/world cup entries because I'm not a citizen. Apparently being a permanent resident & eligible to represent the US (like I am) used to be ok, like last season when there was no problem with me fencing at D1 Nationals. But this season, there's a new policy.
Maybe it's time to finally take the plunge...
PS- for those wondering, I'm Canadian. Born in London, UK to Canadian parents. Moved from Canada to USA in 1994. No, I d
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07-12-2009 11:08 PM 