The Battle of the Nations evokes a lot of associations for many of us. There are battles, camps, communication with friends, acquaintance with a new country, and much more. This is all very cool, and we all love it. But, for sure, every fighter can remember some incident that happened to him or his friends, clearly out of the ordinary.

Joao Zerbinatti still remembers the incident that happened to his friend Fabio Toniolo. This touching and funny story happened in Italy in 2018.

“Fabio lost the BOTN insignia on the last day of the tournament. We spent the next 4 hours looking for it in the middle of the night. He was desperate and told me that he wanted to have that symbol so he could tell stories to his grandchildren someday hahaha. After these hours we finally have found it! We were happy! Since then I have taken special care of all my stuff, medals, and gifts from tournaments”. 

Don’t think that Joao only has a story about his friend! He also shared his own story. Now we are moving to the Battle of the Nations 2019 together with him.

“Another thing happened to me personally. I was about to fight in the Polearm category for my first time in Serbia and I saw that I would face a friend from Argentina. I studied him for about two months to prepare for this fight. But he had problems with the flight and did not come to BotN this time. 

Thanks to these preparations, I made it through the group stage, beating Romania and Hungary, and finished with 5th place. It was the highest result that Brazilians had at the moment. But I still want to meet that Argentinian fighter, I am still ready for it!” 

 The famous female fighter Melanie Gras from Germany also won a very important battle, but this was preceded by a very annoying incident.

“I can recall just one failure from the BotN. It was in Serbia in 2019. I lost my sword while fighting for third place in the Sword and Shield category with the Ukrainian girl. Because of that, the round was a draw and I had to fight the second one. During the fight, I didn’t know that losing my sword was the reason for the draw. After the fight, a marshal told me that, and I was very disappointed and angry. But I won the fight”.

Today Dayna Berghan-Whyman from New Zealand recalls her very first Battle of the Nations with a smile, but in 2018 she was not laughing. Her story is even a little scary!

“I was the fighter for New Zealand in the Longsword duel, the Sword and Shield and Polearm women’s categories. Someone stole my gauntlets, so I had to borrow gauntlets from one of the men from our team. It was a lesson to ALWAYS have someone help you with armor because you don’t want to lose any. Also, because of using borrowed gauntlets, I damaged my hand.” – recalls Dayna.

She was injured in her second fight of the melee and had to go to the hospital because she was choked by the UK team fighters and temporarily lost the eyesight in her left eye. In Dayna`s homeland, an article was even published in a local newspaper about this incident. She had to call her mother and ask not to read the local news because she was alive and quite healthy and didn’t want to scare mom.

For today, perhaps, there are enough stories about incidents with fighters. We are grateful to our heroes for their stories and would like to wish them and all of you fewer such stories and more fun adventures and great fights at the most important HMB tournament in the world – the HMB World Championship Battle of the Nations!