The Fastest Sword Challenge is over, the results have been announced and the awards have found their owners. But the questions remained – How long did the winners train to achieve such high results?
HMBIA News decided to ask our winners about this personally, so here we exclusively reveal their secrets.
Vitaly Karyakin, the participant who took first place with the result of 68 sword strikes in 20 seconds, has a simply colossal experience in our sport – he started to practice it in 2003! Also Vitaly is the founder and coach of the Avalon fencing club located in Kursk (Russia). According to him, since 2014 he has not participated in tournaments for a very good reason:
“My trainees demanded a lot of attention and I devoted all my personal time to them, coaching work, preparing and guiding them to the lists, there was catastrophically no time left for myself. Since January 2021, that is, 3 months ago, I decided to return to HMB myself. My second competition was this Challenge, where the participant can show physical shape and compare your results with like-minded people.”
Vitaly Karyakin learned about his victory on the Vkontakte social network page of the World Championship in HMB Battle of the Nations in the. Was he delighted? Sure! But not only for himself!
“It’s always nice to know that all the workouts done in the gym are not in vain. But the main goal for me was not a personal victory, but the high results of my athletes.
It was important for me to see and understand that the training system I built is working and we are following the correct course in physical training. Since I devote a lot of time to developing programs, studying various sports literature, writing sports articles on the physical training of fencers, this challenge was like an exam on the efficiency of my training programs for explosive strength and speed.
Of course, the fighter’s training is best shown in tournaments where it is necessary to show not only your physical form, but also technical skills and the ability to fence. But, while the borders are closed it is impossible to travel to international competitions. And such Challenges are just perfect so that you can compare yourself with fighters from different countries. I would suggest a second challenge to show one more essential quality of a swordsman – his endurance.”
It is a very interesting idea! We are sure that such a Challenge will arouse the interest of the HMB community around the world.
It is worth noting that Vitaly has one more reason to be proud besides his victory in the Fastest Sword Challenge. His trainee Nikolay Ovchinnikov took second place in this Challenge and another of his teammates – twelfth place!
An amazing result for a trainer and a fighter! We congratulate Vitaly once again and wish him new victories and interesting Challenges.
Now we want to introduce you to his trainee and the winner of the second place in the Challenge.
Nikolay Ovchinnikov also lives in the city of Kursk and has been engaged in HMB since 2014 at the Avalon club. Nikolay’s result is 62 hits in 20 seconds.
According to him, before recording his video, he trained with his coach for a week. And the good news was brought to him by social networks. Nikolai learned that he took 2nd place from the Instagram feed.
Of course, he was pleased with the result and proud that the victory remained with his coach.
As real athletes and friends, Nikolay and Vitaly congratulated each other on the training practically without stopping from the work process.
Since 2014, the athlete regularly took part in HMB tournaments and demonstration fights, where he demonstrated high results. For example, in 2015 he already became the winner of the Sword of Moscow tournament. Last year, in September, Nikolay took second place in the Avalon Cup tournament, losing only to Alexei Petrik. There were many more glorious victories.
Congratulations to Nikolai Ovchinnikov on the second place in the Challenge and an amazing result! We wish him as many new victories and interesting opponents as possible.
There are two winners of the third place. These athletes showed the same result of 60 sword strikes in 20 seconds. Both of our heroes are representatives of different HMB clubs.
So, Timur Sinilnikov from Kondopoga represents the Tannenberg club. He has been engaged in Historical medieval battles for 4 years. Considering that Alexey Petrik, Timur’s coach, proposed the idea of the Fastest Sword Challenge, there was no need to prepare specially for this competition. The techniques and high result from the graduate of the multiple world champion are quite predictable.
As for the second winner of the third place – Dmitry Vasilkov from the Skif club in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is one of the most experienced representatives of the HMB movement. The sword became an extension of his hand back in 2001, when the concept of HMB did not yet exist. He told us that his first tournament was in 2002.
The athlete responded to our call and also demonstrated the result of 60 strokes in 20 seconds, but there were some troubles during the filming preparations:
“I planned to start training for the participation as soon as the announcement of the Challenge was published. I had to practice, because such a series of hits is not typical for me. I usually organize my fight differently. Before recording, I trained for 2 weeks. First I tried to hit a narrow blank imitating of the head and the result was about 45 hits. I wanted more. I watched the video of Alexei Petrik carefully and noticed that he was hitting the wheel. It is wider than the imitation of the head. I found a wheel about the same size as Alexey used in the video and started to train again. This time the result was 56 hits. I decided that it makes no sense to upload a video with less than 60 hits”.
Dmitry reached the goal and now he takes his place in the Fastest Sword Challenge TOP-3.
HMBIA News editors congratulate Timur Sinilnikov and Dmitry Vasilkov on the third place and wish them new challenges and victories!
HMBIA News
