First Charity supported team travels to Athens

Thanks to your generous funding, we have been able to pay the entry fees for the Senior Women’s team competing in Athens on 6 March.

You can donate more here 🙂

The team for this competition consists of Maria Chart, Alexandra Davis, Caitlin Maxwell and Sophia Potter. Three of them, were hard at training when we turned up at the Leon Paul Centre which is the base for the Leon Paul Project where most of the seniors train together at their own expense.

Alex Davis in a moment of relaxation having traveled many many miles from her full time job for an evening’s training at the centre.

Maria and Caiti warm up and have a laugh before getting down to some serious sparring in what was a grueling 2 hour session.

Maria has a full time job and a very understanding employer who lets her take time off to attend World Cups though obviously she has to pay all the costs to get there as do all the others.

Jon Salfield will be going as unofficial but very supportive coach once again. The fencers split his costs between them for the individual event but he doesn’t take payment for the team event, which he does on a purely voluntary basis!

Jon also does all the organisation including hotel bookings and working out which flights to take, arranging transport and so on without any support or recognition.

So the only people who benefit are us as we can enjoy being inspired by them and, of course the team as they don’t have to pay quite so much for the privilege of representing GB as a team (rather than individual).

The team representing the hopes and aspirations of young GB women this time is:

The team achieved a 13th place in Tbilisi, picking up a valuable 21 ranking points and a further 8 points from a 17th place finish in Plovdiv.

The team composition changes depending firstly on the selectors and then on whether the fencers can actually afford the time off or the overall expense of staying an extra day or even two at the competition even though they want to represent their country but get very little out of it personally.

Team in Tbilisi

Team in Plovdiv

So let’s give them our support and thank you once again if you have already supported. It’s really encouraging. We will be hearing from the team. There are more details of funding and links for you to follow on the Funding page