There isn’t big money in armwrestling yet, like in football. That’s why the choice of venue for an international tournament may decide on number of contestants. In this aspect, Poland is ideally located, almost everyone – from both west and east of Europe – have easy and cheap access. This is the first thing that is a big hope for this tournament. The second is prizes. At the “II Zloty Tur Cup”, in the overall category, the prize was 1000 dolars, for first place in category – four hundred for men and two hundred for women. This is less than in tennis, of course, but still not bad. The other strong points are organization and lots of famous names.

On 10^th March 2001 in Gdynia, the biggest armwrestling stars have arrived, and the level was equal to world championships.

The choice of venue was quite original. Usually, armwrestlers meet only in their own group, or with a small audience present. Here we had over six thousand members of the audience. How could that be? The tournament took place at the Gemini Center, which is a mall centre and a place of meeting of thousands of people. Many people haven’t come especially to see the fights, but when they did see them and felt the atmosphere – they stayed on. I can bet that many young guys tried to armwrestle right the next day. This was great promotion for Polish armwrestling.

Tough struggle

Only one female category was fought, and it was there that – strangely – emotions were missing. Veronika Bonkova, suffering a horrible cold, crushed all her rivals completely. Then came the weight category with the Cup defender, winner of first Zloty Tur – Grigorij Bondaruk of Ukraine.

Before they finally faced each other, Bondaruk and Gashewsky had a few easy wins. First, Grigori went over the top and there was a break. The referee strapped them and boom! Lightning fast win for Gashevski. When asked about this failure, Bondaruk said “I didn’t even notice when he started”. As if this wasn’t enough, Bondaruk also lost to younger and lighter compatriot of his, Babayev. In the final fight between Babayev and Gashevsky the advantage went back and forth. Rustam couldn’t withstand such an attack, he fought hard for 23 seconds. His resistance and Tzvetan’s attack went through a couple of phases, it seemed Rustam might yet escape this trap, but finally Tzvetan won.

Great fights also took place in up to 90 kg. In the first final fight, Bill Frank and Igor Kuzniecow faced each other. The German started with such force, that he almost took his opponent off the ground. A foul by Ukrainian, and another fight started. Kuzniecow bent his leg at the knee this time and put his foot on the table leg, right under table top. He used his right hip to lean against the table edge. No help, he still lost.

In the first-place bout with Jan Germanus, Bill had a slight advantage at first, but this was only an illusion, or a technical trick by Germanus. It took Germanus 15 seconds to win the category.

The biggest excitement was in the heavyweight division. There were some great fights by Alexey Voevoda, Frantisek Zivny and Ivan Ivanco.

The overall was fought with very tired contestants, some quit after first round. It took a lot of strength and balance of power to survive a contest as hard as this. Jan Germanus proved the strongest and won the Zloty Tur Cup. Has he defended it in 2002? Read on in the next article.

Paweł Podlewski