A1 Moscow by David Shead

A1 Moscow 

by David Shead

Hi Armwrestling Fans

I have been to Moscow 4 times and I love Moscow’s big grand buildings beautiful monuments, and their metro is fantastic. 

Now on to the Competition, being in Russia, offering more prize money than any other competition, you would expect many of the best Armwrestlers in the World to attend and that is exactly what happened, only the Nemiroff Competition can compete as it attracts more competitors from outside Europe. 

The A1 Competition was very good, it started on time, was well run had no problems, was held in a very nice massive sports hall, had a lovely stage setup even bigger than the European Championships, and a good sporting atmosphere with lots of spectators.

The negative for me was that as this is a professional competition the referees have to go by the guidance of the show organiser, and we were given instructions to allow small fouls, this can make it look like the referees are not doing their job, even though this is often not the case. I personally do not approve of doing this and think it reflects badly on our sport. The organiser claims people want to see pins not fouls ending matches. However Igor Mazurenko (in my opinion the best prompter in Armwrestling) knows a thing or two about running competitions, and he is not a fan of this system either. So this does not happen at the Nemiroff Competition and that is a very popular competition indeed. 

The referees were very well disciplined and all in perfect uniform.(credit to Andrew Mosolov Russian Head Ref) When there was not a match on their table they did not leave the table to watch other matches they stayed at their table which gave a very good professional look to the competition. 

The A1 also ran disabled classes, and is the only professional competition at this level to do so, it worked very well producing some of the best matches of the competition.

Irina Makeeva was in top form and beat the mighty Egle Vaitkute. Egle is always very composed and even quiet, but do not take this to mean she is not passionate about our sport, she was very upset at loosing the final, but Egle it is no disgrace to loose to Irina, use it as your motivation in your training to come back better next year.

The men’s classes were dominated by Dennis Cyplenkov and Andrey Pushkar, Dennis is always the gentleman at the table, and Andery was looking awesome, and although no one else looked to be close to beating Andery even he could not stop Dennis (The Destroyer)Peszy. 

I have not seen what the competition looked like on the internet, but the competition was shown live.

Having this much prize money helps to enhance our sport, and so does including Disabled classes. Full credit To Alexander Filimonov, Nikolai Mishta, and the RAA, for a well run competition. And a top recommendation for competitors to tome to next year.

Thank you for inviting me

 David Shead

COMMUNICATION FROM DOPING CONTROL COMMITTEE

TO: WAF, EAF and NATIONAL ARMWRESTLING FEDERATIONS
19 JUNE 2013 :
EUROARM 2013 DOPING CONTROL RESULTS

Following athletes at European Armwrestling Championship 2013 have been found positive ( A-sample test results )

There are 12 positive cases ,
1/ Viktar BRATCHENIA / BLR
2/ Sinan PEHLIVAN / TUR
3/ Ruslan MAMEDOV /RUS
4/ Timur MAMEDOV / RUS
5/ Taymuraz TSAKHILOV/RUS
6/ Diana BAREEVA /RUS
7/ Genadi KVIKVINIA / GEO
8/ Vladislav ZHYHYLII / UKR
9/ Zaza TABAGARI / GEO
10/ Natalia GURCHIEVA / RUS
11/ Rustam BABAIEV / UKR
12/ Arsen LILIEV / RUS


The above-mentioned athletes ARE SUSPENDED FROM 15 JUNE 2013, until a decision is taken about their case.

Sent by EAF Doping Control Committee.

David Shead - Europeans 2013

Dear Armwrestlers,

European championships 2013 Lithuania

26 Countries, 26 Referee’s, 6 tables, 640 competitors, 1196 entries, sounds impressive, and it was. It ran with the smoothness of a well oiled machine. Despite the numbers we finished the heats between 12:30pm to 1:20pm every day, with the scorers, referees and competitors all playing their part to achieve this.

Of course when things are running this smoothly the wrestlers can focus on what they do best armwrestling and they certainly did, giving us many fantastic and memorable matches. Like the 85kg senior men’s right hand final, between Ievgenii Prudnyk and Rustam Babaiev both from Ukraine . Rustam came to the table on the A side, but incredibly he seemed to be struggling and lost on fouls so it went to rematch and this time Rustam went on the attack and took Ievgenii to within an inch of the pad, amazingly Ievgenii managed to fight back and finish with a pin to make him European champion. I can’t remember that last time I saw Rustam get beaten by somebody of his own body weight, it maybe 10 or 12 years now so full credit to Ievgenii Prudnyk on becoming European champion.

This was a really good championship in a beautiful modern town, the referees were the best they’ve ever been, with extra help from hideki ohmura and Mauro Pascoa (Please see my referees report on the EAF website). But were there faults? Yes, we still had some transportation problems getting people to and from the airport, and the competition did start 50 minutes late on the first day, because of the accursed badge problem, but I know Anna Mazurenko has a plan that we maybe able to build into the championship contract that should stop this happening in the future. And when I have finished consulting with our technical directors I will make a proposal to the EAF Congress that should stop the late starts caused by the badge problems.

Overall I have to say what a fantastic championship this was, with all the officials doing a great job under the guidance of the new WAF chairman Assen Hadjitodrov. I do hope we can achieve something close to this under his leadership at this years world championship in Poland .

Best regards

David Shead

EAF Assistant director of referees