Nationals Day 2
I found myself standing next to a young lady that seemed very familiar to me, though I couldn't immediately place her. There was something about her smile that was all too familiar and I thought I had lost my mind somewhere along the way. Then I realized it. Her name is Sada Jacobson, we have a picture of her hanging on the club bulletin board with a Bronze Olympic medal hanging around her neck. Oh yeah, her. So here I am stading within arms distance of an olympic medalist wearing warm up pants and a simple white tank top. What do I do? I look her over really closely. I want to know what muscles on a saber fencer of her level are most used and developed. This way I can go back to my club and make my fencers do exercises that will develop those same muscles. Easy right? If the Doc hadn't been standing right next to me I would've missed it. There was nothing that I could see above the waist that indicated she even fenced at all. Her shoulders, back, chest, bicepts, looked perfectly typical of anyone her age and build. She looked healthy, but I had seen more overall "fit" bodies" in the college student rec center. Then the Doc saw what I missed. I noticed that the bicept wasn't developed at all. What I missed was the fact that her bicepts and her tricepts were the same size! Holy crap, that's a whole bunch of pushing power on her saber! Her actions were so pure that only what was necessary was used and developed. Wow... And you're probably wondering why I haven't mentioned anything about her below the waist. This is because below the waist she was exactly like every other elite fencer. Her legs were like tree trunks and her hips were to die for. Nothing new there.
Later in the morning I watched her fence for first place at Nationals. Her opponent was very active, very aggressive, and screamed after each touch like a wild cat. In fact I think she must have learned her scream from watching discovery channel. Everyone watching the bout, and there were so many packed so tight that if you didn't know WHO was fencing, you would thing there had been a medical emergency on that strip. Anyway she would scream, Sada would be completely unaffected by it and the crowd would quietly mock the screamer.
The score was something like 8-4 against Sada, when she opened up a can of whupass and won the bout something like 15-7. We are not sure why she started slow and then kicked butt. The Doc suspects it might have been that Sada took a few touches to figure out how the referee was calling what, and then delievered exactly what the referee wanted to see.
After Saber we caught up with Carlos Bruno a former fencer of ours who has gone on to do great things. He entered the tournament at around 136 out of 147 fencers. After the first round of pools he was seeded 33. This was an amazing jump of 103 places. Now was a single elimination 15 touch direct elimination round to make the field of 32. If you make the round of 32 they had repechage so in a nutshell you had to lose twice to be eliminated. Sadly Carlos was eliminated before the top 32. It wasn't his skill or his execution, it was sadly in his head. The one aspect of competition that he hasn't developed yet is a good sports psych attitude where you can let each touch go, let your competitor's antics go, let your equipment problems go, and just focus wholey on the next touch. When we reached the round of eight everyone who did not have this mindset had been eliminated.
So as you can see from my rambling, this trip was extremely educational and I am looking forward to getting what I know drilled in to the young and impressionable minds of our shining students. Anyone can succeed if they are given the tools necessary to win and instilled with the desire to win. The rest is just time.
