BELFAST – Thursday's bouting at the Junior World Championships featured three U.S. college freshmen in action, with Harvard's Caroline Vloka placing 10th in the women's sabre competition while Penn State's Monica Aksamit was 29th (Stanford's Kevin Mo finished 26th in the men's epee event).
VLOKA (Upper Saddle River, N.J.) – the 2009 NCAA runner-up – won all six of her opening bouts, in pool-7, with a +17 indicators. Her most noteworthy early win came vs. Italy's Rossella Gregoria (5-3), who entered the tournament ranked 8th among the world's under-20 women's sabreists (Gregoria ended up placing 25th at the Junior World Championship). Vloka's other pool-round wins included a 5-2 victory over the eventual 8th-place finisher, Romania's Mihaela Bulica. She also posted 5-1 wins vs. Russia's Olga Telezhkina and Great Britain's Sophie Williams, along with a 5-2 victory against Bolivia's Gabriela Ramos and a tight bout with Japan's Haruka Odajima (5-4). Vloka ended up facing Telezhkina again in the direct-elimination (15-9) before losing a round-of-16 bout to Hungary's Reka Peto, 11-15. Peto, who entered the week ranked 5th in the world (among u-20 WS), went on to reach the semifinals.
AKSAMIT (Matawan, N.J.) – who narrowly missed the '09 NCAA medal round, placing 5th – entered the week ranked 19th among the world's u-20 women's sabreists (now 13th). A pair of 5-4 losses were all that prevented her from going 5-0 in pool-9 (3-2/+11), with the narrow losses coming against Kazakhstan's Yulia Zhivitsa (the eventual 12th-place finisher) and Germany's Alexandra Bujdoso, the world's #11-ranked u-20 women's sabreists (she ended up placing 23rd). Aksamit's pool wins included a shutout of Spain's Andrea Marzal and 5-1 bouts against Turkey's Busra Hacibektasoglu and Brazil's Stephanie Grosche. She then won a DE matchup against South Korea's Hyea Rim Kim (15-12) before losing to #9-ranked Lucrezia Sinigaglia of Italy (13-15; Sinigaglia placed 9th).
MO (Irvine, Calif.) – who finished atop the 2008 Junior World Cup men's epee point standings – also went 3-2 in his pool (#20), with a -4 indicators. All of his pool opponents ended up finishing outside the top-25, with his losses coming vs. Poland's Lukasz Rokosz (2-5) and Japan's Yoshiki Hirano (0-5). Mo posted wins over Spain's David Roig (5-3) and Kuwait's Fahed Hasan (5-4; Hasan went on to place 28th), in addition to surviving a 4-3 battle with Venezuela's Gustavo Garcia. Mo's DE bouts included a 10-7 defensive battle with Portugal's Nuno Milhardas and a huge 15-13 victory over Italy's Luca Ferraris, the world's top-ranked u-20 men's epeeist. Ukraine's Yaroslav Ponomarenko (world #11) ended Mo's day, in the round-of-32 (15-12; Ponomarenko ultimately finished 10th).