Daily Photos No. 35: At the European Championships

I can't honestly remember what I was doing at the Euros in Sheffield, 2011. Definitely something: I have the polyester tracksuit to prove it, but whether it was refereeing, team management or welfare I have no clue. I blame the armourers' very competitive travelling whiskey society for the blanks in my recall. I certainly didn't win any medals, that's for sure.

Anyway, there I was and I must have had plenty of time to wander around with my camera. A couple of things come to mind. I very much enjoyed watching a distant cousin on the Irish team destroy the highly-fancied (by themselves) British senior foilists, and I got up close to top-level wheelchair fencing for the first time. It's brutal. The chairs are fixed in a frame locked to the floor so the athletes are in hitting distance at all times. In ambulant fencing you can step out of the way to take a breather and regroup: in wheelchair fencing there's no escape at all. You can rock back and forth a bit, but otherwise you're exposed at all times. The bladework is ridiculously fast. I've tried wheelchair fencing a few times since and it's not for me: I'm just not good enough.

The rather sickening side of photographing the wheelchair competition was subsequently noticing that those shots were viewed by thousands more people than the rest. Delving into the usernames and their histories, it became clear that there's a thriving population of fetishists who get off on amputation. Ugh.

Anyway - this was me playing with higher-speed shots and looking for character and reaction. I got better.

Fencing has had VAR for quite some time. There's nothing worse as a ref than hearing the audience groan when they see a replay you haven't and you know you've got it wrong. 

Self-reproach

Self-congratulation

Laurence Halsted - very much one of the good guys

Halsted lands one

Halsted celebrates

Rigine attacks

Unorthodox

A fléche, parried

An aerial attack

Victory and defeat

Cassara v Avola, men's foil final

Cassara attacks into Avola's preparation (don't @ me, new-style referees)

Avola wins

Guess who's back!

Hi everybody. How are you all? I didn't mean to suspend bloggage for a full week, but life – in the form of the School Games and then the start of Freshers' Week – got in the way rather. The Games were mostly enjoyable. The fencers and other athletes were largely lovely and happy. Tired, bruised and focussed, with the usual fallings out between themselves, but nothing serious. The adults, on the other hand, were infuriating. Some team management seemed to consist of little more than sniping at each other, while some of the parents were vile. Not just demanding, selfish, reactive and dumb, but hostile, rude and arrogant to boot. For future reference, an early start is neither 'child abuse' nor 'a breach of the Children's Act'. Your son is one of several thousand elite sports performers and the occasional early alarm call is entirely normal. Oh, and describing the event as 'not serious' really insults the other participants: being selected to represent your country is actually quite a big thing.

Rant over. Here are some of my favourite pictures from the weekend. I'll spread them over a couple of Vole entries and you can see the rest of the 500 here. Click these to enlarge them. While I'm at it: Flickr Uploadr is awful and I've wasted a day trying to get it to work.