At World Championships in Berlin

The story of how we got to Berlin sounded like a bad joke... "So there was a bus with 10 Egyptians, 7 Americans, and a Polish bus driver who did not speak any English...)" What would take just over 2 hours in a car took us 6 hours by bus with what must be the most inept bus driver in all of Poland... and mind you, we are talking about Poland here! (For those of you who dont know, I am Polish so you can make fun of me also). The real high point of the bus ride was when the bus driver got lost trying to find the hotel in Berlin. He would pull over to some unsuspecting pedestrian, open the door of the bus, and yell out "Bahnhaustrassen" was the name of the street that we were trying to find. The shocked pedestrian would, inevitably, jump back and yell "nine!" implying that they did not want to go there. Eventually, we found the hotel despite the best attempts by our bus driver to get as lost as possible.

Today was the Semi Finals of the World Championships for men. Our women competed yesterday and Sheila and Mickey both easily made it through to the final. They will compete in the final tomorrow. I think that Ted has found a way to have live results on my website, so feel free to check it here. Otherwise, go to Cardsys.hu and good luck navigating a Hungarian website!

In World Cups and World Championships, we have to compete in semi-finals to narrow the field down to 36 for the final. The reason for this is that it would be logistically impossible to fence the roughly 100 competitors and difficult to find the nearly 60 horses you need for that many athletes. As a result, we compete in shooting, fencing, swimming and running and the top 12 athletes from the 3 semi-final groups move on to the final.

Semi-finals always take their toll on a few of the best athletes. Today in my group, the guy who won World Championships last year did not advance. I started in 11th before the run with the 2004 Olympic Gold Medalist right behind me. We both made it through to the final, but the Russian who started right behind us and recently earned a slot at the 2008 Olympics at European Championships did not.

Dennis was very close to making the final, but a bad fence left him in 14th place Niul and Sam did not have good days today and finished farther down.

So on Sunday I will be competing in the final. We will do all 5 sports and nothing from the semi-finals will carry on. You start with a clean slate and the top 36 go head to head. We will try to have results and maybe even some pictures loaded onto the website by early Sunday morning in the US.

Thats all for now. More tomorrow on the women's competition.