Top fencer, Tia Simms-Lymn, 14, has won a silver medal at the Wratislavia Challenge 2014.
The Challenge is the biggest U15 fencing tournament in the world, attracting more than 2000 fencers to the city of Wroclaw in Poland. Fencers from 31 countries took part this year. The competition includes foil, epeé and sabre at U15, U13 and U11 age groups.
Tia, representing Jamaica, took silver in the U15 girls’ epeé. The Plymouth College fencing scholar travelled to Poland with high hopes having finished 9th in the 2013 event. In her first round pool she started shakily dropping 3 of her 6 fights. This seeded her 71st out of the 157 entries going into the knockout direct elimination.
From then on she fenced brilliantly dispatching the number 58 seed Teresa Jasna (Cze) 15-5. In the last 64 she overcame the previously undefeated 7th seed Aleksandra Pernach (Pol) 8-3.
By now Tia was right on top of her game working well with her coach, Andy Hill, in the minute’s break between the fights. The last 32 fight caused very little problem with her easing past Maria Ivanova from Russia 15-7.
At this stage Tia’s tactics were a mixture of well-timed attacks with brilliant counter attacks and parries. Add to that the perfect balance in tactics between first and second intention actions as well as faints on attack and countering and Tia was becoming almost impossible to fence.
The last 16 fight proved difficult in the sense that if Tia had not kept the pressure on it could have swung her opponent’s way. The score of 15-10 against Bianca Benea from Romania seemed comfortable but the feeling was that any letting up on Tia’s part could have let the Romanian in.
Potentially the last 8 fight against the number 2 seed Anna Spatenkova (Cze) could have proved the most difficult but having built a 3 hit lead early on Tia produced a number of tactically sound double hits to win 15-12.
The semi-final involved Tia with another Czech opponent, the number 43 seed Katerina Saligerola. This proved to be a very tense affair with each fencer taking the lead only to be pegged back by very determined fencing from the one behind. Tia crossed the finish line by the narrowest of margins, 15-14.
In the final she fenced the Russian Anastasia Soldatova, an opponent she had met and lost 3-5 to in the seeding pool. Tia started with a brilliant foot hit and up until the first minute break she was only 2 hits behind. However, the Russian fenced very calmly under a barrage of attacks from Tia who by the time the third and final time period came round was desperately trying to close the gap in scores. The 5-12 defeat doesn’t tell the story of how close the fight was with several hits being scored in the final 30 seconds as Tia tried everything she knew to win. At the end of the final a near 500 crowd stood and applauded both fencers.
Plymouth College Director of Modern Pentathlon and Fencing, Andy Hill, was rightly proud of his fencer who he has coached for 6 years.
“Tia moved up a level in world terms in this competition and this will stand her in good stead for the World U17 Championships in Plovdev, Bulgaria,” said Andy. “I am incredibly proud of her. She is a very determined young person and after this the sky is the limit.”
Representing Great Britain, the other Plymouth College fencers – Josh Hellings, Ben Andrews and Catherine Bishop – all finished in the top 70.