Fencing tapes to Eric Dew

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!


I have taped about 2 hours of coverage from the 2004 and 2005 Challenge Bernadotte ME World Cup the 28/3 The notes below are from memory.

The 2004 coverage is the semis and final – Fischer vs. Delhomme, and Jeannet vs. Kolobkov. Fischer takes a lead 4-2 in his semi, Delhomme switches to a lead 10-6 with less than a minute left. Fischer then does a great comeback to 10-10 with 6 seconds left. Jeannet with the priority, but Fischer does a nice counterattack to win 11-10. Delhomme loses his composure, and punts his mask into the roof. Fischer wins the final by the same tactic - never be rash, and let the other guy make the mistakes to use. Beautiful fencing! I recognize a few faces in the background from fencing Sweden.

Fischer wins the final vs. Jeannet.

The 2005 coverage is of the MET final, Italy vs. Hungary. Hungary takes an early lead, and when the Italian anchor fails to to a big comeback against the Hungarian third (Attila Fekete) the Italian fate is all but sealed. The Italian third did two weak starting matches, and is replaced for his last bout by Paolo Milanoli. Milanoli is wearing a positively garish dark blue/write fencing kit. He is doing his trademark scare antics, waving the French-handle epee around, but this does not mess up the fencing of Fekete. It is mentioned that one of the Hungarian fencers is employed as a kit-tester at PBT. In the end, the Hungarians win 45-low thirties.

The production values are good, if a bit long on long-distance shoots. The floor used in the 2004 event is colored after the Swedish Royal coat of arms. The club chairman of the organizing club, and longtime Stockholm fencing federation chairman, is a member of that particular family (as are three Sw. Fencing champions), which also explains why the winner´s cup is so snazzy. This looks colorful, but is in times bad for the contrast.

The 2004 final ref, Charlotte Barvestad, is also part of (co-owner, I think) of the company Touché, which has its sponsorship board just behind the ref.

The commentator, Henning Österberg, is an accomplished fencer himself, and member of the organizing club. I find his commentary on-the-spot, not too intrusive nor too absent. To appreciate his good commenting you must understand Swedish, though.

This tape is going off to Eric Dew, just a previous years.


****Idiot confession coming up****

I had taped the 2004 Olympics. Then I marked in my almanac that I had sent them to Eric, despite not having done so. I found them in a cupboard when getting out a blank tape for the latest taping, and smacked myself hard on the forehead. I feel like a complete doofus for letting the Us. Fencing community down, but hope that you can take my apologies and understand that memories can fail. Sorry.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[edew]

Just to keep some people (sabreur, in particular) abreast about the 2004 Olympics DVDs: I handed them off to a friend to make the PAL->NTSC conversion. He sat on it for a while and didn't have the time to make the conversion. I've taken them back and will check with the duplication house about the costs and process effort. They are viewable on a computer (since the computer doesn't use NTSC/PAL formats), but not currently on DVD set-top boxes.

As I also mentioned, possibly privately to sabreur, several of the disks have some weird problem that prevented me from viewing the disk to completion on my computer. I don't know if the problem arises when a duplicating machine reads the disk. We'll see.

At the moment, I only have one disk made into NTSC format, and that's the MF preliminaries (four bouts) with Cassara over Tiomkin, Ganeev over Bissdorf, another German over Ota or a Korean, and one other.

I hope to have things ready before the 2008 Olympics.