Translated material
Passed out too early
The saber dance will have to be postponed until the team tournament
Failures continue to haunt our fencers. After four types of program, they do not have a single medal to their credit. It seemed that the saber fencers would be able to break this black streak. After all, such aces as four-time Olympic champion Stanislav Pozdnyakov and two-time World Cup winner Alexei Yakimenko took to the track, joining the company of the young Nikolai Kovalev, who has made serious progress this year.On the eve of the competition, an indicative incident occurred. One of the fans who come to support our fencers asked a Vremya Novostey correspondent: “Who are our main competitors?” And it turned out that there is no simple answer to this seemingly simple question. Judge for yourself: the champions of the last two Games in individual competitions were Romanian Mihai Covaliu and Italian Aldo Montano. The 2004 Olympics were won by the French as a team, and the 2007 World Championship by the Hungarians. Last year's European champion was the Spaniard Jorge Pina, and this year the Belarusian Alexander Buikevich excelled. Korean saber fencers have won individual world championship medals for two years in a row. The leader of the world ranking before the Olympics was the German Nicholas Limbach, and the American Keith Smart occupied a high fifth place in it, ahead, in particular, of Pozdnyakov himself. It was impossible to discount the Chinese, who won several serious tournaments this year, and besides, the factor of their home walls had to play for them. Therefore, it turned out that the fight in the saber tournament was expected to be life and death.
Unfortunately, our athletes took part in it for a very short time. All of them died already in the 1/16 finals. This is all the more offensive since their opponents were, in general, quite capable of them. But Alexey Yakimenko, like a month ago in the final of the European Championship, lost to Belarusian Alexander Buikevich - 9:15, Stanislav Pozdnyakov was not like himself in a meeting with the Frenchman Nicolas Lopez - 8:15, and young Nikolai Kovalev could not cope with experienced, but by no means stellar Spaniard Jaime Marti - 12:15.
“I think that the reasons for our guys’ failures lie in the field of psychology,” two-time Olympic champion Mark Rakita expressed his opinion. - Physically the guys were well prepared, but there is no doubt about their skill. Therefore, most likely, they simply “burned out” even before entering the track. At one time, on the eve of the start, I tried not to let my students think too much about the upcoming battles. For example, I sat down to play cards with them, say preference. At the same time, he joked, joked, and tried to tease them. Therefore, they were focused on not becoming the object of my ridicule, or, if they got into trouble, they wanted to give me a worthy answer. We thought about playing the ordered game, in general, about anything, but not about battles. Of course, this is not a universal remedy. The personal trainers of our athletes had to find some of their own approaches, but apparently they didn’t succeed.”
As a result, the gold medal in the saber tournament was won for the first time in history by an Asian representative - Chinese Zhong Man. Interestingly, this is only the second gold medal for Chinese fencers in the history of the sport. And the first one was received in 1984 by foil fencer Luan Zhuzhi. By the way, the now 50-year-old Luan Zhuzhi also started in Beijing, and she now played for the national team... of Canada.
Well, after this failure, our fencing team will definitely not be able to fulfill its plan and win six Olympic medals. Even if today epee fencers Tatyana Logunova and Lyubov Shutova rise to the podium, and in the next days all three Russian teams win medals, then Russian fencers will not be able to take home more than five Beijing medals.