Home » Watch » 06ITA World Championships in Torino » Torino Blog » Sept 24, 2006
September 24th, 2006
Fencing Pictures is proud to have Bill Ward on the FP Team! Bill is a television videographer/ editor specializing in high definition programming. His work has appeared on The Discovery Channel, HGTV, The Food Network, PBS and other networks. He is currently at work on a documentary chronicling the events of the 2006 season of Women's Saber team, culminating at the World Championships in Korea. Bill and his two children, Rebecca and William, admit to some familiarity with a saber.
The Senior World Championships in Turin, Italy this upcoming week will be our fifth visit to the Big Show. It’s odd what events become inextricably linked with each Championship. For me, it often involves a moment of visual impact.
And usually, a food item.
In Bulgaria for the Cadet/Junior Worlds, I was struck by the visual dichotomy right outside our hotel window in Plovdiv, a town named for the sound an Eastern European duck makes when crash-landing into a pond filled with the rusting hulks of Soviet-era tractors.
On the streets along the shopping areas of Plovdiv, you encountered jeans-wearing, fur-clad young adults looking like they just stepped off the MTV-Europe TV set pushing past time-worn, black-clad grandmothers straight from an Eisenstein film of 1930s. On the main thoroughfare we had to cross each day to get to the arena, we seldom failed to spot our favorite comic scene: a mule clopping down the six-lane freeway, pulling a dilapidated flat bed wagon piled high with scavenged bricks, dodging roaring buses and rocketing imported SUVs. Bulgarian food items appeared two-fold: mystery meat on a stick, and pizza made by someone who saw a pizza once on a black and white Albanian TV cooking show in the 50s. All three family members returned home with a sizable collection of Bulgarian amoebas as souvenirs.
Linz, Austria upped the ante for World Championships food. We had heard the praises of the Linzer Torte, but all the pastries in Linz were sublime. Next to Welkenradt, Belgium, some of the bests eats yet at an international competition. It’s the little things that sometimes catch your eye: during the walk each day to the venue, Beth and Becca passed an attractive, but lifeless little pond. On the last day, the pond was teeming with Austrian newts. Go figure.
Leipzig, Germany, Senior Worlds, 2005. Favorite snapshot: Sada Jacobson on the Gold Medal stand during the US National Anthem, getting a cell-phone call from home. “Yeah, we won, uh-oh, I’m up on the EuroVison Jumbotron screen…everyone sees me talking on the phone…gotta go…bye!” Favorite cab ride: the kindly gent who navigated by accident to the backside of the arena. Not one to waste time, he simply drove up the sidewalks and across the expansive concrete apron to deliver us to the front of the building. Favorite German Cabbie epithet: “Schveinhunde!” Favorite German delicacy: anything with “Schnitzel” in the name.
Taebek City, Korea, Cadet/JR Worlds 2006: we learned that KimChee (a Korean delicacy made from cabbage, gasoline and smoked yak glands) comes in three levels of spiciness: Incendiary, Napalm and Geneva Convention Violation. It was a priceless bit of fun watching the US women’s saber squad navigate their way down the buffet line where hardly anything appeared to be an actual, recognizable food item. We thought we’d never reminisce nostalgically about those Bulgarian Mystery Meat on a Stick meals…
Favorite video moment….watching the three American flags ascend into the rafters as the US Cadets swept the medals stand in Women’s Saber. Most puzzling video moment: hearing Graham Wicas relegate his first World Championship title to second class importance, behind the refugee crisis in Darfur. Win globally, emote globally, I guess.
What would be fun for Italy? Video moment: a World Champion Ivan Lee taking a delirious victory lap, wrapped in a purloined Shroud of Turin, pursued by whistle-blowing carabinieri. Must see TV. Food moment: finding a plate of Buffalo Mozzarella slathered in olive oil outside a picturesque café, right next to an open door leading to the room where they store the Shroud of Turin.
Just in case Ivan gets on a roll during the finals.