2014 Bulgarian Nationals

Bulgarian National Championship 2014

21-23 March 2014, Sozopol, Bulgaria

by David Shead

As Bulgaria is my favorite place to ski I went a week early and had a great week skiing in Bansko, then stayed on to do the Bulgarian nationals. I was travelling to the nationals with the Blagoevgrad team named after their town just outside Sofia.

There was a little confusion as to which town I was meeting them in but very soon we were on our way on a six hour road trip across Bulgaria in a large bus, as the team had 25 competitors with quite a lot of youngsters that were being trained by their team captain, Kiril, as well as some other very good world class competitors, so I was looking forward to seeing how well they did.

As we arrived in the city of Sozopol. We had some magnificent views across the black sea, it was so calm it looked like you could walk on it. The venue was on a thin strip of land running about 1/2 a  kilometre into the sea, so you could see the sea from both the front and back of the venue it was all very beautiful, it would be a very nice place to visit for a summer holiday. The venue was a theatre style design with tiered seating making it good for spectators to see. We ran the competition on three tables starting with one for the disabled. They have a large number of seeing impaired in Bulgaria so it was a busy class.

In the senior classes the level is very high as they have more than one world champion, and their skills feed right through to the inter club championships that they are all keen to win, making it a very competitive championship indeed with all the competitors helping each other trying to win more points for their club.

Their head referee is Hristo Delidzhakov, who is also a WAF master referee as well as a world champion arm wrestler, we also had two referee’s come over from Romania  their head referee Victor Barbu, and senior referee Eduard Dimiean, so along with the Bulgarian referee’s we were well equipped to handle the refereeing with the new rules, we also had WAF and EAF general secretary  Mircea Simionescu-Simicel who came over from  Romania to help with the technical side of things, so with WAF and EAF chairman Assen Hadjitodorov over seeing it, it all it went very smoothly.

This is a very good example of what can be achieved with people from different countries coming together and passing on their skills while running an excellent championships.

David Shead

EAF Assistant Director of Referee's