Latin America knows this team with the horses on the shields very well. They take part almost in every tournament in Argentina. San Isidro Combate Medieval HMB club (the SICom in short) is our topic for today.

Their story has a very unusual start – after the first HMB Cup “GRAND PRIX” in Argentina  in 2015, when the owner of a local gym watched the fights and proposed to Sergio Scabone (the founder and mentor of the club)  the idea to start practicing the sport in the gym. After some time recruiting people an official HMB club was formed. They are located in the city of San Isidro, in the northern part of the capital Buenos Aires. SICoM athletes train in “Club Estrella”, a small club that provides them a workshop to build and repair the armour and a large enough place to train duels and buhurt at the same time.

By the way, let’s talk about the logo of the San Isidro Combate Medieval HMB club! Their  current logo was created by one of their clubmates Karina. The girl improved the old version of the logo so it became stylish and effective. Lautaro Palomino Duran, a member of the SICoM HMB club told HMBIA News the following about the history of the logo and motto creation:

“Since the beginning of our club we featured a stallion on the logo because our city is known for its enormous horse racecourse where 3 HMB and Buhurt League tournaments have taken place. Our motto is “equo citato ad victoriam” (riding to victory), a clear nod to the horse in our heraldic and an expression that we are still working to be the best fighters we can, then the victory will come”.

For today they have 13 active fighters, both men and women. We can see the male buhurt team as often as possible on the lists of big tournaments regularly. The female team is still training to reach the status of an official buhurt team. Also there are 10 aspirants that are working hard on their armor and the trainings to enter the list and get medals for their team.

Clubmates usually train twice a week in the club on the technique and sparring and, of course, they work on strength and stamina in the gym. Fighters chose to specialize in duel or mass battles and they perform exercises according to the chosen category. Matias Fernandez, the captain of the club helps them a lot as he is their best Longsword duel category fighter and one of the pillars of the buhurt team.

These people have known each other for years and of course they have their own atmosphere in the club. They even have some specific names for the fighters in the club and a special tradition that unites all fighters of SICom:
“We have the older fighters like our captain, Daniel Lucero or Lautaro Palomino, and to the new members we assign them nicknames for a quality they have, such as Juan “El pequeño” Ramos (“the little one” 1.90 m 120 kg) or Martin “el chatarrero” Feinsilber (“scrapman” he used to fight in an armor made from different  sets and owned by different people), – Lautaro Palomino said, – A tradition we have is putting the Lord of the Rings soundtrack when we are making or repairing our armor in the workshop, we are all fans of the books/movies and the songs encouraged us to keep working, especially the dwarves ones”.

Also Lautaro mentioned that there is a lot of friendship between the SICoM members. When they are together the atmosphere is just great. As someone said “We are muscled nerds with armor” and after every training they love to tell roleplaying anecdotes or share Lord of the Rings trivia.Another funny and useful tradition they practice is to walk among the public in armor after every tournament, pose for photos with children and speak to the adults trying to involve new people in the club and to popularize HMB sport in the city and in Argentina.

As we found out, these hardworking and purposeful HMB athletes are good enough to  challenge the best Argentinian teams as Valherjes or Draconem Clan. To compete with such teams SICoM trains really hard! According to Lautaro Palomino, they have a few trainers for different HMB categories:
“We have a different trainer for individual and group categories, Lautaro Palomino and Daniel Lucero in that order. In addition our captain oversees both trainers and adds his experience to the new recruits. Also, our founder and mentor Sergio Scabone supervises and coordinates the long term training plan and gives the most important classes himself.

We as trainers are very grateful to HMB Argentina and the HMBIA for bringing Sergey Ukolov in 2017, as well as members of the Partizan and Bear Paw teams in 2018, who both gave a seminar on their categories (Ukolov duels, Bern Buhurt).  Not only do they improve the level of the country’s fighters in general, but they taught our trainers how to teach the sport to the new generation”.

SICoM even created their recipe for success! They have learned that the best way to make the public interested in the club is participating in tournaments, the bigger is the tournament, the more you get the interest of people:
“Recently, we participated in our first international tournament in Brazil and the response from the Argentinians was amazing ; we got new recruits eager to enter the list. Our next big goal to increase our club’s fame is to participate in bigger tournaments. Our fighters are training, planning and saving a lot of money to participate in the legendary Dynamo Cup in Moscow.”

Also the main big goal is to represent Argentina in the best way they can, to become the best fighters in the country so everyone can be proud of their performance. Who knows, they might be future medalists of the HMB World Championship Battle of the Nations 2021… HMBIA News are sure that SICoM is going to be there!!!Also on behalf of the entire HMBIA News editorial team, we also want to thank the local government of San Isidro for supporting the HMB sport, SICoM club and hosting the 3 biggest tournaments in Argentina and a lot of small tournaments and exhibitions.

HMBIA News