Last weekend was the canadian junior/cadet nationals and senior csc #1.
On Saturday I had senior men's epee and had a difficult pool to start off with. Since nationals and csc's are now closed, pools are generally very strong, particularly in epee. I lost to Vince Pelletier in my first match. I let him get a few freebies before I really started fencing but I couldn't catch up. After that I fenced Max brinck who has given me a lot of trouble. I fenced great against him and beat him by being patient. Next, I had another strong fencer who I beat. After that I had one of the cadets on the national team - he had improved dramatically since the last time we fenced and beat me by being patient and counter-attacking. Finally I had a less experienced fencer who I managed to beat 5-0.
In the first round of D.E.'s I had a cadet with a bizarre fencing style. Super-fast, but with a lack of basic distance and timing; however, his speed and bizarre remises really stumped me and he ended up winning our match 15-11.
The next day I had junior, and I breezed through my pool fairly easily. Rich gave me trouble in my first match but after that it was smooth sailing. I finished the pool 5-0 +15 and got a bye into the 16 (super pools) by virtue of being in the top 4 after pools.
In my super pool I fenced ok but not great. Finished 4-3 with a +7 indicator. I lost to C. Lavoie when he hit me with 0 seconds on the clock and I lost to heidecker after leading 4-2.
In the 8 I had V. Lavoie who had recently beat me 15-8 at Easterns. Him and I have had a lot of good matches over the last couple years with each of us winning a few.
The first period started off terribly - Vince picked me off with counter-attacks, remises and long lunges to the thigh and before I knew it I was down 6-1.
Tigran and Igor talked to me during the break. Basically they told me to make vince come and then to take his blade (or not) and hit him. I imposed myself in the second and made him attack where and when I wanted to. At the end of the second it was 10-8 (still for vince).
In the third I kept pushing and leveled the score at 10. Unfortunately I couldn't get past the "hump" and vince got 2 in a row off my missed attacks. Vince finished it off 15-12 and finished up 2nd.
After the individual competition was junior provincial team. Though I'm from BC, I now fence for Quebec so I was representing Quebec here. Our team was myk lambert, guillaume D-G, vince lavoie and I. Our team was ranked first and since there were only a handful of teams we got a bye to the semis.
As a team we decided to put Vince on the bench for the first match because he had had the best result in the individual and looked pretty tired, so we wanted to save him for the final.
Our semi was against Alberta and the other guys asked me to anchor, which I was happy to do. At the beginning the score was fairly close but we just kept winning every match and by the time I got to the anchor match the score was 40-22. I tried to flick the other guy on the back to finish the match (at the request of the quebecois spectators) so I got hit a couple times when I messed up the preparation before finishing it out.
Before the final we drew straws to decide who was fencing because our coach said that everyone was fencing well. Unfortunately Vince got the short straw and missed out on fencing again.
The final was against an underdog Ontario team that showed a lot of resiliency. The team included the cadet (McCleod) who had beat me in senior and he managed to beat me by 2 again in this match. Our team's original plan was to just fence the match and try to win each bout. Basically, to just outfence the other team. Unfortunately their team was fencing better than usual or our team was fencing worse than usual and they managed to build a small lead.
Our team adapted and formulated a new strategy - to keep the score low until gui fenced against mccleod because guillaume was capable of wrecking him. The strategy failed though as mccleod managed to get double after double to finish the match 9-9 and preserve the ontario lead. After that we decided to keep the score low again for the match between myk and the fencer who was subbed in to replace mccleod (dubois-didcock). In my match I won 3-2 to set the stage for myk to make our comeback. Again though, our plans failed miserably as didcock managed to fence myk to a tie in the 3rd last match so that we still trailed by 4.
In the second last match, Vince got subbed in for Gui. He was energized from sitting on the bench and went out there with the goal of catching up a couple points. Vince dominated and wrecked his opponent to the tune of +5 to give our team a lead of 37-36 going into the final match.
The last match was between Hutchinson and I. Hutchinson has given me trouble for the last couple of years and knocked me out of repechage at the nac in atlanta; however, I beat him in my super pool and then bragged to my coach, "I've got it now, I can do it again and every time from now on." So this was a good opportunity to test my confidence.
Right away I scored a nice disengage attack into him which he was not expecting to increase the score to 38-36. But after that he started to press me hard and got 2 nice attacks to tie it up. After that I sat way down on my legs and started working the distance hard. I fought hard to make him start so that I could finish with simple counter-attacks in good distance. As I started to pull away the whole Quebec bench started going crazy and I finished the match out 45-42 for the gold.
07-04-2008 02:44 AM