This weekend several of WSG travelled to one of the largest and most prestigious events on the HEMA tournament calendar, Swordfish 2014, which takes place at Aktiviteten sports centre, near Gothenburg in Sweden.
This year there was an open longsword tournament, women’s longsword, sabre, rapier & dagger and ringen competitions. Each day there were several classes and a wealth of traders to tempt the attendees with shiny goods. As well as competing some of us taught workshops:
- Keep your shirt on: jacketed Ringen – Peter Smallridge
- Quarterstaff – Kit Smith,
- Two Swords from Palladini, Altoni, and Docciolini – Fran and Pim Terminiello
- Know your enemy: How to proceed against a timid, reckless, phlegmatic or choleric opponent, according to Alfieri – Francesca and Piermarco Terminiello
Kit, Peter, Mike and Tomas also judged many pool bouts, and Claudia was on demand as medic for much of the proceedings.
It was very smoothly organised by host club GHFS, and the tournament itself was ably run by Rob Runacres of neighbouring HEMA group Renaissance Sword Club (who also took bronze in rapier & dagger). All the action of the finals was captured via livestream and will soon be available to watch again on Youtube. We’re pleased to say the training paid off, there were brilliant performances from all and we earned the following placements:
Rapier & dagger gold – Pim Terminiello
Middleweight ringen gold – Peter Smallridge
Women’s longsword silver – Claudia Krause
We wish to thank the hosts GHFS and all our friends who kindly ferried us to various places and looked after us. Congratulations to all the winners, we took away many memories, and look forward to Swordfish 2015.
The winners
GHFS arranged Swordfish but Rob Runacre did the tournament?
Rob organised the pools and judges for all the competitions, co-tournament managed and project managed the event.