It's memorable for so many things. Mostly the fear: I'm not a parent and was a very boring teenager, so working out how to entertain, support and corral dozens of high-spirited kids over the course of several days in a new country and with plenty of downtime was a real challenge. Some were homesick, some were boisterous, some hid injuries and eating disorders were not unknown. Some had friendship groups acquired from the competition circuit while others were on their own (and let's not even get on to my infamous rant about Fencing Parents And How To Murder Them). Quite a few were terrified of the scale and the level of Challenge Wratislavia, a major U-15 competition, while a select few, having done well in Britain, thought they'd ace it. Reader: they didn't, and it was a fraught but ultimately educational experience for us all.
I've been a lot of things in the fencing world: mediocre competitor, mediocre referee (up to World Cup level!), mediocre team manager, mediocre welfare officer, mediocre coach, mediocre roadie and much else beside, though those days are largely over. I gave up competing seriously once I started my PhD: training 4 nights a week and travelling to competitions was impossible on £6500 a year. Instead I turned to coaching and refereeing, gradually going further afield and taking on more responsibility. That trip to Poland was a corker. It started with a parent handing over her daughter and asking if she could sit next to me on the plane because she'd never flown before, was terrified and needed a reassuring presence. I smiled, faked it and didn't let on that I'd flown precisely once in my life, a flight which involved a faulty engine and a lightning strike and didn't persuade me of the need to ever repeat the experience. I still hate flying and only do it if there's absolutely no alternative.
Most of the time I really liked it - given a few days with a group of people you learn what they want, sometimes what they need, when to blunder gracelessly in and when to shut up. As a coach I learned that the very best fencer can get something out of a lesson from a very bad coach, and that sometimes less is more. Also that wandering aimlessly around with a camera and a couple of languages means you can steal techniques that make you look like the king of the world back in the fencing backwater that is the UK. Despite the massive problems I have with the fencing world, especially the way it's run here and its troubling demographic profile (to put it mildly), I enjoy the camaraderie of doing an odd sort of sport, and of the joys of volunteering in it. The backstage crew of technicians, armourers, referees and the like are usually quirky, clever, witty people who – once they've decided you're not a dick – form a travelling community of people who enjoy seeing each other in windowless sports halls week after week. It has its own vocabulary, its own rhythms, complaints and joys. I was astonished how quickly the 2012 Olympics became just another long competition, working with familiar faces and facing the same problems as heads of state wandered by (Putin was a particular pain in the backside) or gold medal winners celebrated while you were trying to repair a spool.
I've reined back my involvement recently - I train regularly and do a couple of competitions per year, but the increasing professionalisation of the bigger events and my own commitments means that I volunteer closer to home – a bit of refereeing (though I'm really too old-school for the contemporary version of foil) and lumping kit around, plus chairing the West Midlands committee. One thing I really appreciate is the total separation of my quotidian life from my fencing life. My friends and students couldn't imagine my fencing persona, nor are they interested. Likewise, the stresses and strains of daily life are irrelevant once you're in the salle or on the piste. Apart from the chap whose opening comment was 'Don't you recognise this tie? It's from Eton', you're judged only by your ability, whether that's in correctly clamping a wheelchair into its frame or spotting the correct use of counter-time. I always enjoyed working with youth teams, and especially liked the UK School Games, which was slowly murdered by the 2015 government for the crime of being a Labour invention. I even, god help me, coped with the 2 a.m. hotel room patrols.
These photos aren't particularly special - as I acquired a better eye and a better camera they improved, and I might share some with you later on. The challenges for fencing photography are that everyone looks the same in the full kit, that everything happens at ultra-high speed, and that flash is banned. I ended up compromising by using an f/1.2 50mm lens for the action shots and otherwise looking for the moments of triumph and disaster at which people display their personalities most obviously. I like these two shots though because they're not formal - in the first, three of the young epeeists go through their warm-up with such obvious enthusiasm, while the second one gives you a sense of the Wroclaw outskirts, taken from the coach. The city centre is a beautiful pastiche, a medieval heart rebuilt brick by brick after it was flattened during WW2, but the majority is as you see above: flat, cold and bare, especially during the winter. The two figures are local fencers on their way to the venue: it reminds me that while fencing is still sadly an elitist sport in much of the UK, it's a perfectly normal one for the people who live in those flats.
OK, another one tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment