FM Open yesterday! For a competition 3 days before CAs, it was exceedingly fun =) Was the only fencer under NUS, and I wonder how many people thought I was easy meat cos of that...

Sat around with my juniors from VJ studying bout oesophagus, gastrin and etc, until warmup and round robin. Round robin was quite easy for me, cos I was placed in a pool where I was the most experienced fencer. Not to say I wasn't pushed. Though I was fencing very economicaly, the only opponent which managed to force me to accelerate was a little sec 1 SJI guy who was being cheered on by his family. I won 5-3 but not before getting a scare by getting led from the stat...

Madness... He was small sized but forced me to do double circular locks to get my points =/ In the end won my bouts 5-3, 5-2, 5-4, 5-4, 3-0, seeded 8th after round robin

My first DE was against a sec. 2 boy Cornelius from SJI, seeded 40th, who fences almost exactly like me, uing locks and parries. Man. I hate fencing people like myself. His close quarters were even faster than mine cos he was shorter than me, so it was easier for him to manouver. Dropped a lot of points in the second segment especially cos I was thinking about %^(^&@ CA, but held off Maurice-style to win 15-9, as per Coach's teaching parameters

Round of 16 was against 9th seed Kian Seng, a CJC fencer. Matches against CJC are always the toughest cos they bring the loudest and the most supporters against you, though I guess for VJ, that's always relative.. If you can field more than, say, 7 people, you're already considered "more" supporters than us haha...

Kian Seng, like his brother, was no pushover. He's got great physical strength to match. His greatest problem was that, like Cornelius, I was the first person fencing foil-style against him. My greatest problem was that I was still thinking bout CAs and so my mind was kinda split, and kept making mistakes here and there.

In the end my experience JUST made it, cos all his epee-style fleches got locked up, followed by a close quarters to his gluteus maximus or to his hepatic flexure of the colon... Won 14-13, but not after my very worthy opponent gave me a cold sweat.

And the Round of 8! Ahh, the memories. The bronze medal bout. Against No. 1 Seed Ken from Malaysia fencing for FM. I had heard his reputation - static fencer, fantastically explosive and accurate with his attack. Daniel Mendoza said "Him? He's a cyborg!" His Round Robin scores backed it up. 5 wins, no losses, and where I had gotten a points difference of 10, he had one of 18!

Still, having never fenced him or even watched him fence before, I wasn't too scared. Then, the two blades I was using proceeded to fail during weapons check, leaving me with a red card and 1 point down. So the score was like 0-1 even before the match started.

Ken proceeded to take another point by the fastest, most out-of-the-world hand hit I've ever seen. I was absolutely stunned.

From then on, I went into my trademark fast attack mode, drawing on everything I learnt bout fencing tall accurate people from Maurice. In fact, Ken is the first person besides Maurice I've needed to do triple and more parries in order to hit. I was dancing around him, and in the course of the match, hit him with every different type of hit I've known in 3 years - close quarters to the front and back, simple lunges, turning stop hits, flicks to the hand, and all the rest of it. I'd say, it was probably the best competitive epee bout I've fenced before.

But he was JUST too GOOD and I missed a bronze medal losing 15-13. Later, I discovered that was the closest anyone that day came to beating him, except for in the Finals where he lost to Weiwen. (No shame in that for him... Weiwen is one of the SEA games fencers for this year...)

But well, enjoyed myself enormously yesterday, and in the end was placed 5th out of a field of 54, so was quite happy with that =)

Also nice to see my juniors, and especially nice to run into Daniel and Maurice again (both of whom had to rush back to camp).. Oh yea and running into Angie also, in Clementi for training with her coach.. And today my rotator cuff is giving severe ache =/

~JcZw~ at 10:30 am