Women's Epee

Oct 1, 2007

St Petersburg

Day 3 of our ongoing coverage of the 2007 St. Petersburg World Championships! Today we have Women's Epee, which had its preliminaries yesterday while MF was finishing.

SMS users -- we sent our notification last night. Did you get it? If not, please try submitting your cell phone # again. Some phone formats were rejected by our phone service. Remember to include country and area codes. SMS service is free. Read more about the SMS service here or sign up here.

Take a look at the very strong top-16 field (FIE rankings as of Sept 07, 2007), or view the faces of the top women's epee fencers in our Epee Gallery .

Emese Szasz of Hungary and the always formidable Laura Flessel-Colovic enter today's WE event ranked 1-2, with a powerful field behind them. Swiss star Sophie Lamon has recovered from hip surgery and is on the rise. Canadian Sherraine Schalm (Mackay) is always a threat. As always, the Estonian team is the wild card, with frequent finals appearances. Who will win?

If you can't wait to see some fencing, here's our coverage of the 2007 Montreal Grand Prix -- Bokel GER vs. Picot FRA.

16:05 The red strip lights are on fire!

So far under control but at least will delay the competition.

16:30 The fire is gone.

The competition continues in the other hall.

18:30 Everthing back to normal.

The semifinals are:

1. Embrish EST - Heidemann GER

2. Li Na CHN - Maureen Nisima FRA

19:30 Final

Heidemann GER - Li Na CHN (14-10)

20:30 Congratulations to Britta Heidemann GER

World Champion 2007

Summary of the day

Britta Heidemann (Germany) took the Gold Medal in Womens Epee on day three
of this years Fencing World Championships in St. Petersburg, Russia. She
beat LI Na 14:10. It is Heidemanns first title. With this important win in
the Olympic qualification Heidemann¹s place for Beijing is almost safe. The
German loves China and speaks almost fluent mandarin. That might have
motived here in todays competition. Li Na was loosing her concentration at
the end of the gold medal match, tried several attacks, but none really
worked.
Before the Quarter-Finals a fire at the lighting equipment forced the
organisers to change the Quarterfinals to side pistes. A Power Supply
started burning, the fire was estinguished after 20 minutes. No person was
harmed and the finals started on time as expected in the St. Petersburg
Sports and Concerthall (SKK).