2019/20 EVF körversenyek értékelése – beszámoló…

2019-20 European Veterans Circuit Report:

Please find below a message from Caryl Oliver and a presentation from Leonardo Patti.

Hello to all our Fencing Colleagues in Europe,

We are pleased to release to you the presentation and report that Leonardo Patti has compiled and would normally have presented to you live at our Congress.   As you will see, despite the set-backs of this year, the Circuit has been a success and I would have asked for a round of applause for Leonardo and all the Organisers who staged competitions this season.   We have our 2020 Fencers of the Year and hope that we can celebrate them in the near future.   We have planned for the 2021 Season but cannot make any predictions at this stage.

Caryl Oliver – President

2019-20 European Veterans Circuit Report

We started the European Veterans Circuit in the current 2019-20 season with the aim to provide motivation for fencers to travel outside their own countries and to provide quality events to encourage local fencers to enter.

The data shown in the presentation confirm that we achieved this goal even if the season could not be completed because of COVID-19. We would like to thank all the organisers who made a success of the European Circuit and all the fencers who travelled to participate in these events.

Sadly, only 8 of the 12 events could be completed (3 for épée and foil and 2 for sabre) with more than 800 fencers participating; among the participants more than 50% are foreigners travelling from abroad and more than 30% of the host country fencers never participated in the previous European Championships: these figures confirm once more that the goal has been achieved.

As a result of the interest in our Circuit, we have received requests from more countries to include events or to increase current events to include more weapons. The twelve original events were awarded for three years and so we decided to add one weapon to three events to reach a total of 5 events for per weapon.

The resulting provisional calendar is available in the presentation. Unfortunately we cannot foretell how COVID-19 will develop throughout Europe in the next months and we have to be ready to reschedule the events according to the situation.

We started this season providing the organisers with very general guidelines, leaving them with considerable flexibility on most issues regarding their competition organisation; after the experience and feedback we got from this first season, we decided to update the guidelines in order to provide a more uniform approach to the whole European Circuit.

The ranking system looks adequate at the moment according to the data shown in the presentation and we have been able to award the inaugural Fencers of the Year; however we will review at the end of the next season based on the total number of events from which the rankings may be calculated.

Leonardo Patti
Director – European Veterans Circuit