I thought of this a few years ago but never got around to coding it – essentially if you’re running a fencing club social media account, website news page or maybe you announce the recent results at club nights, it’s very easy to miss who competed in what competition.
Fast forward to now, several years after thinking about creating a page to help with this, I believe there still isn’t any place you can visit that can easily present that information. Well, there is now. I’ve expanded the Club Profile page to include all results by fencers from the selected club.
I can’t say for certain, but it can’t be far from the truth, Challenge Wratislavia is one of the biggest International youth fencing competitions in the world. It’s been in and out of favour as a selection event with England Fencing over the past few years, but rewind a few years and this is what U15 fencers in England were all focused on – getting their ENG stripes and being part of the squad travelling to Wroclaw. I was fortunate enough to attend this competions 4 times, not just with the England squad but also as an independent. It’s a truely fantastic event and a great entry point to competitive International fencing. If you just fancy a taste of International fencing or you’re looking for that stepping stone into the EFC U17 cadet series, this is event for you. Fingers crossed England Fencing reverse the terrible decision to remove this as a selection event and the next generations of fencers can once again experience this great competition as part of the England squad.
So, with that being said, I thought it would be interesting to see how fencers have performed for their countries over the years and how results at Challenge Wratislavia translate to performances in EFC cadet events and FIE junior world cups. You can see all of this for yourself right here;
If you had some involvement in fencing (epee that is) before 2019, the chances are you used my web site epee.me. Four years have now passed since I closed the site down and I thought I’d have a look at where we are with competition results and ranking data. First up, let’s take a look at the British Fencing web site to see how the governing body present the data.
Results
It’s an extremely basic system with limited functionality. You can select gender, age, weapon and date range which then displays a chronological descending list of events and clicking on them shows the full results (except for International events where only GBR fencers results are displayed). Navigation options are somewhat limited (most disappear completely when you get to the results page) and the data is not linked in any way so it’s not possible to view anything more than just the competition result. There is no way of looking at a fencers competition history, previous winners of the event or anything related to ranking (that is a separate section).
Rankings
Once you get past the totally unnecessary page of category images and ultimately to the link where you can “view the full file”, what’s actually displayed here is actually well laid out and easy to follow. However, there is no historical data and it is essentially completely standalone – linking this to competition results should have been a minimum requirement I’d suggest.
The current rankings page offers up a link to “NEW: LATEST RANKINGS – Beta Version” which I checked, but I couldn’t really see any difference between this and the existing system aside from the removal of the category images. The primary change appears to be a more real-time insight into the rankings rather than having an update once a month.
So in summary, in my opinion British Fencing still have a long way to go to make the event results and rankings data both usable and useful. Small changes have been to the presentation of the data which is a good step forward, but it’s still a considerably long way from being a good system.
What else is out there?
England Fencing have started to use ophardt.online for rankings and a number of events that have taken place in the UK are now in their system. This is great to see as it ophardt offers a lot of nice extra data analysis features and automatically brings in data from many International events to a fencers profile.
There are also some other domestic event results finding their way onto ophardt, like the Welsh Open, Birmingham International, Invicta, etc but generally speaking, it’s missing most historical data for competitions held in this country. It must be said thought, that for U12 and U14 events held over the past couple of years, this is now a very good system.
A glimpse into the future with the British Fencing Ratings Pilot for foil …
It looks like a system that actually links fencers with the competition history and ranking (rating) points might be on the horizon. This is showing a lot of potential but it’s clear from browsing around there is still a lot of work to be done with the way the data is presented, as well as bringing in results from before 2022. It looks like we may have to wait until 2025 before this is fully rolled out and even then, it may not be for epee.
Conclusions
It’s actually a bit disappointing that there is still no web site or app out there for GBR epee fencers that allows them to easily check their current and/or historical results, rankings and performance at domestic and International competitions. With that in mind, and as I was recently looking for some old resullts for another project, I dug out an old backup of the epee.me data, restored that into a fresh db and downloaded the source code I put on github. After a few tweaks to the configs I had much of it up and running fairly quickly. A few evenings later of importing data, and it’s almost completely up to date – aside from the rankings, as that’s going to take more thought due to British Fencing constantly changing how they are applied, I’ve now got a fully functioning site.
Like I said above rankings are a little but problematical to resolve quickly, so instead I added some new features – most active epee fencers, most active clubs, largest events, etc. Everything else is pretty much the same as it was before;
I adjusted some of the more advanced analysis tools too, which I think I may expand on a little in the next few weeks as they offer a great insight into performance not only domestically but also Internationally.
That’s it for now. I’m not sure how I’ll continue with this, but for the time being you can access everything at https://dankew.me/epee/index.php
