Our club athletes went to Europe for a series of competitions and training camps over the holidays, fencing and training with some of the best fencers in the world. This was an invaluable and enjoyable experience in their fencing development; for many, it was a chance to train harder and push themselves beyond their limits while for others, it was a great opportunity to become more disciplined, resilient, and more motivated, and just generally enjoy how fencing is experienced around the world.
It was an eventful and packed competition and training agenda – variously, we went to European Cadet Circuit competitions in Grenoble, Budapest, Nuremberg, Copenhagen, and Cabries. There was also Junior World Cup in Laupheim, and some our top Team Singapore athletes went to Legnano and Novi Sad for their Senior World Cups; Kiria even traveled to Vancouver, Canada after her training stint in Europe on her Olympic qualification journey.
We had a number of notable results, including a record making 2nd place finish by Elle Koh at the Grenoble ECC! She also finished 5th in the Laupheim JWC, after qualifying 1st after the preliminary rounds, after losing to World Junior #4 to Joyce (USA) in the Top 8.
Angellena Wong fought valiantly to top the results amongst the Singaporeans in Budapest, finishing 22nd in a field of 245 fencers, while Lemuel Huang finished a respectable 40th out of 236 fencers in Nuremberg. Their results will help to cement their placing for qualification to the upcoming editions of the Asian and World Junior and Cadet Championships!
We are very, very grateful to our European hosts in the various cities we visited. We are particularly grateful for the coaches and athletes of the Bonn Training Center where we had a chance to spar and train with the German Team. We look forward to training with them again, and to bring more of our aspiring athletes with us from Singapore.