Fencing Team Leaves for Macau

Good Spirits and Great Shape

The Team GB fencers and their support team leave for the BOA holding camp in Macau tomorrow evening (31 July) having completed their technical training camps around Europe during July.

A delegation of 14 is travelling to Macau, including the three athletes competing in Beijing (Martina Emanuel and Richard Kruse at foil and Alex O'Connell at sabre). Each fencer has two sparring partners, hand selected from Russia, Hungary, Italy and the UK, to give them a variety of opponent options, together with four coaches and the Team Manager/Performance Director. The full delegation is listed below.

Graham Watts , the Team Manager, said ' This is the strongest small group of athletes we have sent to an Olympic Games since Barcelona in 1992*. Martina and Alex are young fencers, not long out of the junior circuit, and it would be wrong to burden them with too much expectation. Both have been training hard - Martina at the Italian National Olympic Camp in Lignano and Alex at the Hungarian equivalent in Tata where he came 2nd in a training competition involving the Olympic entrants from Hungary, Germany and South America. I would expect both of them to have a bout winning experience in Beijing and it would be a good achievement for either (both ranked just outside the world top 100 in their disciplines) to reach the L32 in their events. Anything beyond that will be huge bonus to the already great boost they have had for their development towards medal challenges in 2012. You can't buy this experience as a necessary prelude to that.'

(* the fencing team at Atlanta and Athens was 2 athletes and 3 athletes in Sydney)

'Elsewhere it is a very experienced group - for example, our lead foil coach, Ziemek Wojciechowski is attending his eighth Olympic Games as an accredited athlete or coach'. He continued, 'Richard Kruse has struggled with a foot injury over the past year and we rested him from the recent European Championships to protect his foot. He watched his long-term friend and team-mate, Laurence Halsted, win 5 consecutive direct elimination bouts (against some of the medal favourites in Beijing) to win the silver medal and I'm sure that this will spur him on to achieve a great result in the Olympics. Richard is likely to be seeded around 15 but I'm hoping that he will at least equal his top 8 result from Athens. He is certainly capable of going beyond this to reach the medal zone and there will be many opponents out there that will not wish to meet him in the draw. He is definitely hungry enough and he fears no-one in the event.'

Team

Athletes

Martina Emanuel (women's foil)

Richard Kruse (men's foil)

Alex O'Connell (men's sabre)

Accredited Coaches

Peter Frohlich (sabre)

Ziemek Wojciechowski (foil)

Personal Coaches

Giulio Molteni (foil)

David Sach (sabre)

Team Manager/PD

Graham Watts

Sparring Partners

Adrienn Berta (foil)

Anthony Crutchett (sabre)

Pal Nagy (sabre)

Eleanora Ponzoni (foil)

Ahmed Rosowsky (foil)

Artem Sedov ((foil)