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