It’s a holiday weekend around here, so I won’t write much.  I just thought it might be nice to show a couple more bouts from the ’79 Junior Worlds, recorded on video by Len Carnighan.  If you missed the first story, it’s here:

http://westcoastfencingarchive.com/2015/11/23/1979-junior-world-championships-university-of-notre-dame-part-one/

With the following two bouts, you’ll get a chance to see the balance of the six finalists.  In the first one up today, the two German teammates go head-to-head.  Matthias Gey (who won the World Championship in 1987) versus Martin Baumgarten.  In the second, the final two competitors, Vladimir Lapitski versus Krystof Puzianowski.

Hey, I finally found a picture of one of these four guys!  Of course, it’s the most well known.  I’m really digging to try and find some picture of Lapitski, figuring he’s got to be somewhat well covered due to his terribly injury at the 1980 Olympics.  But no luck so far.  Still, we’ve got this:

Gey_Mathias

Matthias Gey 

Let’s get to it!

The next bout brings to mind another thing about the rule changes that have taken place since this was recorded.  Last week I mentioned the reversal of the lights and the scores – touches are scored for you now, rather than against – and the elimination of the meter warning.  This upcoming match reminded me of the change in bout time.  No more relaxed 6 minutes of fencing time in today’s world.  Today it’s 3 minutes with an open clock, so there’s no mystery about how much time might be left in a bout.  Back in ’79, you could poke along for 5 minutes and then you’d get a warning that there was only a minute left.  Thus, the pace of some of these bouts can seem glacial compared to what you’d see on YouTube from this weekend’s Grand Prix foil bouts that were available for live streaming from Torino.  Jeez, what a different world we live in.

One last note.  I changed the spelling of ‘Lapitski’ from last week.  I was spelling it with a “y” at the end, but the .pdf of the JWC results lists the spelling of his name as ending in “i”.  So I changed to conform with that spelling.

 

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