The HMB movement was properly introduced to us, Finns, early this year. And since then we have been working really hard to make a team for “Battle of the Nations.” At first it seemed like an impossible task due to armor prices and the lack of preparation time, but we did deal with this and now we actually can make it happen.

In March, some of us went to Warsaw to see the final tournament of the Polish buhurt league and we met there some great people engaged in the sport. We talked a lot to Polish, German and Belarusian fighters and all of them were very friendly and supported our team a lot.

National team consists of 12 male and 1 female fighters. It’s a good composition both in quality and quantity, as we actually decided to go only 4 months ago. We have one female fighter – 22 years old Ansu Balac. Ansu is the only woman, at the moment, practicing fights in armour in Finland, so she has only fought with men. What about buhurts in general, we don’t have too much actual experience I such. But there is a well-developed padded weapon fighting culture in Finland and many of our team members has practiced it for a long time by their own. Also there is rather strong mix of fighters from different martial arts like boxing, wrestling and kickboxing in our team.

As a team, we are very eager to come to “Battle of the Nations” and experience us for the first time. We want to meet great fighters and teams from different countries, and, of course, fight hard with them. There is much we can learn from the experience of other nations practicing the sport.

Juri Lönn,

captain of National team of Finland