I want to give a shout out to the folks in the blue blazers. I can only address this from my event, but it can be inferred for the rest.

Sure, people are going to blame a loss on the ref, sometimes they do make the wrong call. But guess what? They are human.

Let's see the fencer fences a bout and then gets a small break between pool bouts. The ref is standing on concrete all day long, not a comfortable thing. They are getting physically and mentally tired.

In my own events, we were shorted refs and when we did have two, onw would occasionally get pulled for another event while we were swappiing chairs in and out of the frames. At one point, Sean was looking through the sheet at the up coming bouts and would tell us, "OK, so and so in this frame, so and so in this frame, etc and he would call one bout, tell us who was next up in that frame and move to the next frame where we were just sitting and waiting for our ref. He went from frame to frame without a complaint.

Kevin was also an excellent ref. Good sense of humor, patient, had a good beat and was easy to dance to. He interacted very well with the fencers, but still went from frame to frame to keep us moving.

Gary, the same thing, answered questions, frame to frame, treated the fencers with respect, knows the rules very well, and in general made the bouts move along with a good flow.

While I am at it let me digress for a minute and thank our "pit crews" who got us loaded in and out of the frames fast and effeciently. Even when we had to flip frames (e.g. lefty lefty, righty righty, lefty righty.)

There was a ton of logistics and they ran a very effecient event.

Back to the overall theme. Have you ever read a rulebook? Try it sometime and you will be amazed, the ref called it right.

OK, enough, when you thank the ref (and you should) really mean it and know what the tournament is like from their side. (OK guys any double touch lights in foil are obviously mine, right? )