The world cup in Montreal this year was relatively small and weak compared to its days as a grand prix; however, there were some very good Canadian, American and international fencers.

My pool:
First match was against Smith, who I've fenced at NACs and training camps so I kind of knew what to expect. He's patient and extremely fast when he does choose to go so I had to be very patient myself and ready on my legs so that I could avoid his attacks. First touch is his off a nice toe lunge to fleche combination, second is mine when he tries the same action again and I counter into it. I ended up winning in overtime off a parry riposte. It was a great way to start off my day because it gave me a lot of confidence in sticking with my patient game plan.

Then I had Pelletier, who is always tough because of his length, intelligence and point control. I won that one 5-4 in overtime off a nice counter-attack fleche.

Next I had Blom, who was a Canadian fencer until moving to Holland last year and counted as one of the non-Canadians in our pool. My weapons failed in my match with him and I ended up having to borrow one of his to finish the bout but gutted out a tough 5-4 win.

Then I frantically repaired a couple epees.

Gardner had been fencing terribly up to this point in the pool, but got things together when he fenced me. I felt that there were several touches that should have been mine and I lost a bit of confidence in my tip during this match. He won it 5-2 and I partially blamed my weapon and partially blamed myself.

Up next was Arthurs, who I normally don't have much difficulty with, but either my weapon was a little faulty or I believed it was and allowed it to disrupt my game because this match was TIGHT. I asked the ref a couple times if I could change epees because there were several actions where I felt that I'd made a parry-riposte and not gotten a light on... leading to easy remises for my opponent. The problem was that my epee was working... just not well. So the ref wouldn't let me change it until I asked a final time when the match went into overtime. I won off a soft 4 parry-riposte which I don't think my other epee would have registered a hit on.

Finally, I had the younger Limardo brother who was the only true international fencer in the pool. He's very physically strong (particularly his upper body) and has good parries and coupés so I decided to outwait him. I got up on a nice counter-attack and a parry-riposte (2-1) and then got a sweet duck counter-attack to make it 3-1 with time running out. That's what it finished at.

So I won the pool by going 5-1 but had pretty weak indicators. I was seeded 12th after pools, and since the top 16 fencers get immediately placed into the table of 64 I was going into the table with a #28 seed and the opportunity to fence someone who had done worse than me in pools in the first round.

Saturday morning I drew Tomy Linteau, who is the single fencer in Canada that I have the worst lifetime record against. My confidence from the day before carried over, but how I executed my gameplan was no good and he got up pretty big early and took me out. I wanted to force him to come to me but I was too passive and I let him pick his spots. I fenced better towards the end but it was too little too late. I was still hungry to fence after the match.

Luckily, on Sunday some of the coaches organized a training team competition at the venue so we got 5 strong teams and had a round robin.

Canada 1 was B. Simard, Linteau, Gantsevich and Bajgoric (the senior national team)
Canada 2 was V. Lavoie, Lambert, Leblanc (the FISU team) plus McCleod as alternate
USA 1 was Bratton, Smith and Rodney
USA 2 was Duncan, Watson and Carnahan
And finally we had the International team (or the Cleveland Cavs) with Normile, myself and Israelian (our LeBron)

Our team was quite strong and I started off in the "energy position". The third to last fencer in the final order who fences all of his/her matches in rapid succession. At first it was because I was the weakest link... I went -2 against USA 1 and -4 against Canada 1, but as the day wore on Normile started to get tired and discussed switching roles with me to make me 2nd last; however, we stuck with the original order - we needed Israelian to finish and I was able to recover quickly (after getting mostly over my initial hangover and nausea) between my matches.

I was able to score a lot more touches against the #2 teams and had very good matches with all of the US 2 team and McCleod on the Canadian 2 team.

On the day, our team went 3-1, losing only to Canada 1 but still tying for first since they lost to Canada 2.

The team competition managed to stretch from 10 in the morning to around 3 in the afternoon and by the end we were all exhausted and starved, but it did make the trip much more worthwhile since it gave us all an opportunity to fence with some unfamiliar fencers.