The last two days were quite busy for us. Serving tournament for over 320 competitors on both hands during last 2 days is, I have to admit, a great challenge. Cooperating with another federation, keeping their working standards and introducing our experience in conducting armwrestling tournaments we have managed to end the tournament quite fast and without too many problems.

What did we do well?

A procedure of weighting 320 people in a record-breaking time (that’s what we’ve been recently writing about), IDs production, corrections in weight classes (that were quite a few for such an amount of people). Conducting tournament at 6 tables with just one person to read players’ names and one to scan IDs, ran pretty well. So, Yulya Khozyainovea and Alena Avtushkova deserve many thanks for this piece of work. Referees, although is quite a limited group on the second day also did great. Thanks to the people especially designated to the work and correct work done by the main referee, it all ran without any bigger problems.

On our hand, it may be said that the programme prepared by the EAF and FAP workers and Mazurenko Armwrestling Promotion was good enough. The other people working in a system said that conducting tournaments at 6 tables is not a big problem and they would even made with 10 ones. Of course some corrections are essential, but no sooner than at the European Championships in Poland, this year – then the program will be prepared in its last version and passed all the federation.

What didn’t we do well?

It’s always hard to be criticized. However everyone learns by mistakes.

And so there were some mistakes here. In my opinion the biggest problem was the confusion caused on the first day of the tournament during the cup-final. But it was managed to finish all up and the first day end up with no problems. The second incident that took place was unsportsmanlike behaviour of one of the players representatives, who did not treat the tournament conductors culturally. It ended up with an appropriate penalty and removing him from the building, where the tournament was taking place.

Sports side of the tournament

Most of the players, who stood at the table this weekend are the players In do not personally know. As they are juniors they are just starting to appear on the armwrestling stage. But as of yet, I’d like to warn all the world’s players – the Russian team consists of many well trained future European and World champions. I do not recommend you to underestimate any of the Russian players, so you’d better take up the fight with such a player seriously and with a full engagement. There were some injuries to take place but I’d like to quote one of the Russian trainers:

My player got injured to the hospital. Waiting for an arm’s x-ray, ha called me and said: trainer – register me on the right arm. The left one is injured, but I can fight on right arm.

It’s an evidence of the engagement of those young people and their attitude to their duels and the sport.

The summary

More pluses than minuses makes the tournament successful. So now, the Russian Senior Championships should be awaited. We will be there and try to make some more accounts. Now it’s time to go to bed and come back to Poland soon.

chmiel