Five gold Olympic medals, ten World Championship titles, six winners in European Championships, eleven World Cups – that was the track record of Valentina Vezzali before the start of the European fencing tournament "Euro-2009". But it seems like well-known Italian didn’t want to stop collecting titles. Today in Plovdiv (Bulgaria), among the strongest European fencers, she has won a gold medal which became 33rd in her supercareer.

No doubt Vezzali was the best one. Let’s have a look at the results of her duels. Anna Bentley (Great Britain) – 15:2, Ilaria Salvatori (Italy) – 15:4, Christina Stahl (Romania) – 15:7, Gabriella Varga (Hungary) – 15:13, and Katja Vahter (Germany) in the final – 15:8 – that’s how “Valentina The Great” did it.

If Vezzali’s victory could be predicted, the success of Russian sabre fencer Veniamin Reshetnikov became the real sensation. A fellow countryman of legendary Stanislav Pozdniakov and Grigory Kirienko (they all are from Novosibirsk) hadn’t achieved big success before, though he could become European Champion in team competition in 2007. But he used to be only the third number in the powerful Russian team, where Stanislav Pozdniakov and Alexey Jakimenko were absolute frontrunners. His greatest success of this season was European U23 Championships’ silver medal, and before the start of “Euro-2009” Reshetnikov used to be only 61st in FIE ranking.

But actually his success couldn’t be called random. On his way to the victory the Russian defeated three Top-10 fencers: Rares Dumitrescu (Romania) – 15:13, Aldo Montano (Italy) – 15:13, and Julien Pillet (France) in final – 15:14. He also managed to beat such masters as Dmitry Lapkes (Belarus) – 15:10, and Gianpiero Pastore (Italy) – 15:6, and Reshetnikov became a winner of the European Championship.

By the way, right in two weeks, on July, 28th, Reshetnikov will celebrate his 23rd anniversary. Gold of “Euro-2009” is a nice birthday gift, isn’t it?