12.5.2013 / 19th Junior, 28th Senior, 5th Veteran & 3rd Youth European Championships1 coment

European championship is done

European championship was preceded by long and hard preparation on training camps with national team. This year´s Euro was not my first, but was the first in this ITF. Many people asked me about difference between european championship in two ITF I was member of.
But I have to say there are just details in rules, otherwise you still have two legs and arms and have to train hard to succeed.

We met on Monday really early morning in Prague Chodov, travelling to South Bohemia to get rest of team for Slovenia. Trip was pretty smooth thank to movies. I was looking forward to weighing because I did not drink nor eat anything for whole day. I managed to be in weight limit others have to run for a while to loose some weight. We did some easy training in the afternoon. Some team patterns and who was not part of team did some pad work. Great menu for dinner was satisfaction after hard day.

Tournament itself started with opening ceremony the next day. I was looking forward to big show, so one singer and one dancing group disappointed me and this ceremony was kind of waste of time we had to endure before return to hotel. Our hotel was just few minutes of saling from the hall, so no waiting for bus etc.

We got first valuable medals during the very first day. Senior male team got second place in patterns, it was Vóďa´s premiere and eventhough being quite nervous (and doing at least billion of pressups during camps for his mistakes) he did great and did not look like team newbie. Our boys lost to Russia 3:2 in extra round.

Jirka Huml was our next warrior, winning gold in special techniques and being strong member of male junior team in this discipline, where they also got gold.

My chance for showing my qualities came later. It was my first time in team competititon what was both great honour and responsibility. I fought in individual sparring during Saturday. There is a big difference when you fight alone (with 50 shouting Russians) or with 20 friends shouting and motivating you. Eventhough I was not able to win first round it was great experience. Successes came later in team competition. We started in power breaking which is my favourite. I did nomination technique - palkup - being a bit nervous at first, but after motivation all girls I focused ("bow,test,stance..." broke it without problem (I went through so hard that I hit the board holder also - pretty painful experince, some padding should be added!!) . Thanks to our coach Jana who was there for a while and gave me advices. We continued with other techniques and got gold medal, our best powerbreaking women Hanka Šiveňová got also medal in individual power.
Then sparring started. Again my first experience with team sparring on Euro, as we were not able to have full team in the other ITF. We fought Scotland at first, defeating them and fought hard with Ukraine loosing 4:6. We got bronze medal. Boys had same destiny, defeating Germany and loosing tightly to Ukraine.

Whole event gave me many experiences and motivation to further improve. I want to thank to whole national team, especially to our trainer Jana Hoňková, who helped us through whole prepraration, my instructor Ondra who trained us in home dojang, to Tomáš (Vóďa) who supported me strongly and to my parents who are helping me my whole tkd career.
Jana