In the past few years, there has been a clear gap in popularity and prevalence between duel and buhurt categories, with a bias towards the buhurts. Wishing to balance the categories and increase the popularity of duels, it was decided to found the Duel League. This was announced during the HMBIA General Assembly in November 2020.
Most HMB tournaments include only buhurt categories in their program, and duels were staged as an additional activity. The Duel League aims to change this situation and regain the popularity and prestige of the duel categories. The project was headed by Ivan Koryagin, head of the HMBIA Tournament Committee.
“A distinctive feature of the Duel League project is that there are literally a number of separate national projects to popularize duel categories that are implemented by the National HMB organization. Any National HMB organization that has signed a formal agreement with HMBIA can join the Duel League project. In turn, the Association provides coordination, information exchange and methodological support”.
During the 7 months of the League’s existence, the National Organizations of Russia, USA, Israel, New Zealand, France and Serbia have joined the project. Each of these Organizations develops and implements its own action plan to support and develop the HMB duel categories in their countries. Among the events are duel tournaments, educational webinars, open training, national ratings of fighters, the creation of registers of duel fighters and clubs, among many others.
Due to the pandemic and numerous restrictions on public events, the HMB community in many countries faced great difficulties in planning and organizing tournaments and competitions.
“The current restrictions on travel between countries have especially affected the big buhurt tournaments, which were based on attracting teams from other countries. Duel tournaments, on the other hand, have become more popular, since they initially involve a smaller number of fighters and can be held even in countries where the HMB community is small. The organization of a duel tournament is also much easier and cheaper”.
HMBIA plans to bring back the prestige and popularity of the HMB dueling categories and attract a large number of new fighters and fans to HMB sports by providing comprehensive support to the National HMB organizations through the Duel League project.
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