Hi Guys,
Let’s do it while it’s fresh – Swordfish 2015 the biggest HEMA event in Europe, by many considered to be the unofficial world championship in historical fencing due the extremely high level of fencing and the sheer number of participants from all over the world.
It happened over the last weekend – congratulations to all winners: Anders Linnard in longsword, Peter Smallridge in heavyweight wrestling, Piermarco Terminiello in rapier, and others I can’t recall right now but also to all silver and bronze medalists as the level was really high this year!
It’s a bit awkward to review a tournament that you just watched via livestream and participated only virtually but here we go:
- Weighted scoring system – again it worked really well, different scores for different body targets, doubles and afterblow points were substracted from the main score. I’m more and more convinced that this is the way to go with the current HEMA skill level as it really promotes clear fights (which are great for the spectators). We are going to use similar system from next year onwards both for our Blademasters League and the Blademasters Cup our official tournament that we’re going to launch in 2016.
- Longsword being our main interest in the moment is the focus of my review now, loads of skilled longsword people out there with the overall level much higher than the last year. There are more and more sport fencers who are switching to HEMA and they tend to fight in a more sporty way, forcing people to use proper distance management and footwork techniques. But this is good, it’s a lesson for both parties.
- Russian invasion :) – they came, they fought and they won loads of medals in all categories, again big influence of sport fencing here but if it works and if it can bring more people to participate in HEMA then i’m all up for it.
So here’s the video below – this is the expanded livestream version that includes invitational sword and buckler tournament, worth to check too!
Longsword finals starting at 2:14:00
Enjoy!
PS. We got a backlog of other past tournaments that happened over the last few months – there are so many of them now it’s really hard to keep track or to choose the most important ones! I’ll try to put a few more reviews over the next few weeks so watch that space!