STOURBRIDGE fencer Peter Baron was in action at the World Veterans Fencing Championships in Hungary last week.

He had qualified for the category C (70+) sabre event and having narrowly missed out on the foil was promoted when another member of the squad was unable to take up his place. He similarly took the category C place in the sabre team event.

A new seeding system was introduced this year to reduce the randomness of the first round poules.

This, since he could only count one year toward his seeding in Tuesday’s foil event, meant, despite a Last 16 result in 2013, a lowly ranking of 43rd.

The result was a tough first round poule. Nearly beating one of the top seeds, being 4-3 up and 4-4 when time ran out he eventually lost 5-4 in the added minute.

So, he could only manage two victories out of his six fights.

This left him as 28th seed out of the nearly 40 entries and facing the fifth seeded American Davis Carvey for a place in the last 16.

Baron raced to an 8-1 lead before Carvey made a comeback, scoring three hits in a row.

However, Baron hung on to complete the victory 10-5. His reward was a fight for the last eight against Nikoloz Andriadze (Ukr), the 1984 World Senior Champion.

Baron took an early lead then the lead see-sawed before the Ukrainian finally managed to build a couple of hits lead and finally ran out 10-7 winner and progressed to the bronze medal match, losing to nine times World Veteran Champion and Senior World champion Gary Aftandilov (RUS) in the semi-final. The latter comfortably won the final to make his haul 10 Veterans golds.

The following day, he hoped to add to his tally of medals in the sabre, his main event. The first round went well, where he dropped only one fight, narrowly, to old German rival Hans Visser, winning the rest comfortably. This left him as seventh seed and gave him a bye into the last 16.

There he had another comfortable win 10-3 over Josef Krammer.

Meanwhile, his friend, rival and reigning World Champion, Malcolm Cawton, had a mediocre first round, ending up 18th seed. This brought the pair face-to-face yet again for a place in the semi-final. Again it was Cawton who prevailed and by a bigger margin than is normally the case, with one hit usually separating them.

Both Baron and his wife Janet will be taking part in the Commonwealth Veterans Fencing championships next month, when Peter will also be assistant England team manager.