The Bulgarian women's sabre team consisting of Olga Khramova, Yoana Ilieva, Emma Neykova and Veronika Vasileva finished in fifth place at the World Fencing Championships for men and women in Georgia, sportal.bg reported.
Our young team showed exceptional fighting spirit and maturity, remained one step away from medals and recorded the best performance of a Bulgarian women's sabre team at a world championship.
After yesterday in the preliminary round our sabrewomen eliminated the strong team of Greece, today in their first match of the direct eliminations of the best 16 Khramova, Ilieva, Neykova and Vasileva defeated the experienced rivals from Ukraine with 45:41. The match was extremely contested and until the last change it was point for point. At 40:39, Yoana Ilieva came out on the track and took the victory with 45:41. In the duel for a place on the honorary ladder, the Bulgarian women lost to Hungary with 38:45.
In the matches for the distribution of places from 5 to 8, our fencers showed their class and recorded two consecutive victories: with 45:32 over China and with 45:41 over the USA. Thus, Khramova, Ilieva, Neykova and Vasileva finished the tournament in 5th place and showed that they have great potential and we will soon see them on the honorary ladder of major championships. The Bulgarian women, who before the start of the world championship were in 12th place in the world team rankings, in two days recorded 4 victories against teams from the top 10 of the rankings, and demonstrated enormous growth.