Dear Armwrestlers,

It did help that the world championships was in Poland possibly the best organised Armwrestling country we have, and being run by Igor Mazurenko (in my opinion the best Armwrestling promoter in the world) Is a very good way to start and he did put on a fantastic show with a great stage set up, a lovely animated video opening ceremony of Poland’s history all carefully designed so you could follow it no matter what language you spoke, but like all WAF championships it is WAF officials who run the competition itself, and with the change of leadership came many changes in the systems used and the officials who use them, the most notable The new WAF General Secretary “Mircea Simionescu Simicel” The new Technical director and director of scoring “Marcin Mielniczuk” and his assistant “Peter Veres” the compare Anders Axklo and not forgetting Igors Wife Anna Mazurenko who does a great deal organising behind the seen, and with 45 countries 1200 wrestlers 9 tables with 2000 entries it takes a lot of organising to get things to run this well.

My first world’s was 1987 and I have only missed one since then and that is a lot of world championship’s unfortunately in the last 10 or more years only 3 came up to a good standard and the last 2 where some of the worst, now some problems like transport and hotels are down to the host country but most, like the running of the championships (the most important) are down to WAF.

To give you one example in 2011 the competition started 3 hours late and in 2012 it was 5 hours late, now to put that in to perspective this year we had finished the heats before the competition had even started in 2012 !!!

That was just the start, the hole championship’s ran well with virtually no problems, of Corse the where some referee call protests I don’t

know how many but it seemed less than before and for good reason one being, we have more Master referees, 2 more joined our ranks, Monika Duma for the 2nd time now she is back from her retirement, and Andrey Sushylov, congratulations to you both.

The other big change was that we used cameras to watch for elbow fouls in the finals of both senior days, now it may be down to the confidence people had in the cameras, just good luck, or a bit of both, but their was not one single protest in the finals those days,

And I don’t remember ever seeing that happen in the WAF finals.

(Please see my full camera report on the EAF web site)

Least to say this was the best world Championships ever, as near perfect as I could have hoped for, Igor and his team brought the WAF championships up a giant step in 2001 and he has done it again in 2013, Congratulations to you.

David Shead

EAF Assistant Director of Referees