The 2006 Championships were held in Torino, Italy, site of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games held in February. The team stayed in the Olympic Village constructed for the athletes.

The 2006 team achieved its best results ever, with three individual and one team medal -- all women's saber fencers.

Below, Sada lets us know about life at Worlds, from seeking out bicerin on a fencer's day off to competing for medals at the biggest competition of the year. Keep reading for a first-hand account of what it was like to be there while the women's saber team achieved its historic results.

Friday, September 29, 2006

We arrived in Torino, Italy this afternoon after a long, but thankfully uneventful trip. Even our luggage made it, which was a huge relief for me after a failed trip to the Ukraine earlier this season and bags that were MIA for several weeks afterwards. After a long bus ride accompanied by a police escort (who knew Italy was so dangerous!), we arrived in the Olympic Village. Walking around the site, I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between this and my first Village in Athens. Although this one is several times smaller, it still consists of the same boxy, numbered buildings. My feeling of Mediterranean déjà vu was enhanced by the improbable tropical hues of the dorms. Ours is mango orange. We have arrived just three days before we compete, so there isn’t much down time. As soon as we dropped our bags in the room we were off again, running to get our equipment to the armorers, attend team meetings, and grab dinner in the cafeteria. After a heated debate regarding the edibility of the food, we finally got to go to bed. In spite of the fact that it was only 3pm in the States, no one had any trouble falling asleep.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

We had our first practice in the Village today. The organizers set up about sixteen strips and the room has been relatively quiet, so we were able to spread out and take our time. My coach, Arkady Burdan, is here until the individual event is over, so I took a long lesson and fenced a few light bouts. After lunch we walked over to the venue (the former Olympic skating rink), which is connected to the Village by a huge red walking bridge that crosses the train tracks. Near the vendors is the “USA house,” a small enclosure that US Fencing has rented as a place for us to put our bags, work with the trainers, eat, and generally relax.

The organizers put together incredible opening ceremonies this evening. The event began with a procession of the athletes into one of the main squares downtown. It seemed like the whole city of Torino turned out to watch. The Italians really pulled out all the stops on these festivities, with parachutists trailing smoke in the colors of the Italian flag, hundreds of dancers and performers, and even a giant-sized epee, foil, and saber that each took about fifteen people to carry.

Sunday, October 1, 2006

At any major tournament there is a certain amount of buzz about the newest/most controversial developments in the sport. Last year it was the testing and retesting of the timing in foil and saber. This year it’s the video replay. Starting in the table of 32, fencers now have the opportunity to challenge the referee’s call up to three times over the course of the bout. This has raised considerable discussion over how the replay will influence the strategy of the bout, whether this method will even be effective, and if it will decrease the subjectivity of refereeing. Personally, I see the replay system as an excellent idea in theory, but am frustrated that the FIE would institute such a major change with little advance notice and at the most important competition of the year.

Fortunately, we had a chance to see the new rules in action while watching the second day of the men’s saber competition today. At first, it seemed there would be little change. There were a lot of requests for replays from the athletes, but the majority of challenged calls were not overturned. Still, there were a few incidents where the replay drastically changed the course of the bout. What should have been a major win for Tim Morehouse in the round of 32, for example, turned into an amazingly trying defeat when a last ditch challenge from his opponent at 15-14 caused the ref to reverse a call originally made in Tim’s favor. We were shocked that a victory could change hands so quickly.

Monday, October 2, 2006

Today was the second day of the Women’s Saber event. As soon as we arrived at the venue this morning, I could feel tension in the air. This is the first World Championship of the quadrennial that is considered truly important for Olympic qualification and seeding, and now that the FIE is awarding triple points for this tournament, the stakes are especially high. Plus, the Italians have managed not only to sell out the venue, but to oversell it. Where else but Italy could fencing be such a popular spectator sport?

My first three bouts of the day were solid. I was moving well, thinking clearly, and feeling fairly relaxed (well, relatively speaking). Before I knew it, I was in the 8, along with Mariel Zagunis and Becca Ward. As luck would have it, we were all in different brackets of the tableau—none of the Americans would have to fence each other. I drew Annelise Touya (FRA), last year’s World Champion and a fierce, focused competitor. We’ve had many close matches over the years, so even though I faced a tough opponent, I was confident that I knew what to expect. As usual, the lead changed hands several times over the course of the bout, but I felt I was strategically a step behind until the very end of the bout. Things clicked into place just in time, and I won the match 15-14. I was thrilled with this victory not so much because it meant my first medal at Senior Worlds, but because it was just a great bout against a strong fencer after a not-so-great season.

Mariel and Becca also won their bouts and there was no more avoiding it—the Americans would have to fence. I faced Mariel in the first bout and although I had been fencing well during our warm up, I lost my focus as soon as the bout started. To make matters worse, the ref and I had an obvious difference of opinion over what constituted an attack. Instead of accepting his interpretation and changing my game, I broke one of the cardinal rules of competitive fencing: “Always fence the director.” I kept thinking, “This time he’ll have to give it to me.” Bad idea. Mariel, a very experienced fencer at this level, played a much smarter game. She found what worked and stuck with it. I lost the bout.

Although I was frustrated to have come so far only to lose at the home stretch, I was happy for the bronze medal finish. For the last three years, I have had exactly the same result at World Championships: fifth. Breaking into the top-4 seemed like an insurmountable battle until today. Even though it wasn’t the result I wanted, it was still progress.

Becca went on to win, making her the youngest Senior World Champion in history. I was really impressed with her fencing in the final. In her first bout, against Kim (KOR), she came back from a 14-10 deficit to win. Then she skillfully faced her teammate and Olympic champion, Mariel, in the final. To see such concentration and composure in someone who has only been fencing on the international circuit for a couple of years is truly remarkable. She fenced like a champion.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

We have five days between the individual and team events. This seems like a long stretch of time after a season of fencing these events consecutively at the world cups, especially for Mariel and Caity Thompson, who are both in college and anxious to get back to their schoolwork. Still, we need the rest. We all felt drained after such an emotionally charged day yesterday and are looking forward to taking it easy until Saturday.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Today was the “rest day” of the competition. It’s the day the FIE sets aside for administrative meetings and regrouping, so there was very little competition going on at the venue. Almost everyone on the team managed to escape the Village today and headed downtown for shopping or sightseeing.

It was pretty cool. It's a very accessible walking city. There was always some architectural detail on the building you were passing, some piazza with a statue of a historic figure, or some store window to look into. I wouldn't recommend it for shopping unless you have something specific in mind--it was very expensive.

Soren Thompson, Seth Kelsey, and I decided to create our own walking tour to sample the city’s special drink, bicerin, which is a mixture of coffee, hot chocolate, and heavy cream. It’s very rich, but we felt it was our responsibility to thoroughly research this concoction for the benefit of future travelers to Torino.

Actually, we went to one place, had our glass of Bicerin, and were all set to go to the next place, which was a few blocks away. When we got there, though, we discovered it was closed. We tried to act disappointed, but no one really wanted another--those things are great, but so rich that one was MORE than enough.

All in all, it was a very relaxing day, even if we did return several pounds heavier.

Thursday-Friday, October 5-6, 2006

Two days off. We went over to the venue to watch the other teams compete, had practices, etc, but generally we logged a lot of time at the Village, hanging out in the dining hall, doing homework, resting.Most of the time we were eating in the Village cafeteria. By the end of the trip I thought I would never be able to eat pasta again in my life.

The waiting -- Of course there are always some nerves when you think about what's at stake. But I think the general feeling was that this was not the goal in and of itself--this is training for Beijing. It's of course important to go for the World Championships title, but the seeding we would get from doing well in Torino was more critical. So we went in optimistic. Also, team events are just never quite as nerve wracking as the individual. You're part of a team, so the burden of responsibility is shared. It makes the whole experience a lot more fun.

Saturday, October 7, 2006

Our team event was today. As defending champions from last year and the team that had swept the individual event just a few days before, we all felt a lot of pressure to repeat our performance in Leipzig. We started the day well with a series of decisive wins over Canada, Ukraine, and Poland, and considered ourselves lucky not to meet up with Russia or France, our two toughest rivals, until the gold medal match. We faced France in the final after they toppled top-seeded Russia. Although we started off strong, our physical and emotional endurance seemed to fizzle somewhere in the middle of the match. We lost our lead and never regained it, having to settle for silver and La Marseillaise instead of The Star- Spangled Banner. Still, at the end of the day we had to laugh—when a bad day means silver, imagine what a good day is like! We left Torino early the next morning knowing that this is just one more step forward on the road to Beijing.