A day after the unpleasant incident that the Israeli fencing team underwent, in which a bomb warning was received at the hotel where it is staying, the Blue and White delegation is already making its way to Israel (Monday) from the Swiss competition city of Bern. This story was first published in Israel Hayom.
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Fencer Ido Harpa recounted the stressful experience: "I haven't had such a competition yet, it was stressful to arrive near the hotel and hear from the security guard that it was impossible to move forward because of a bomb announcement at the hotel. As soon as the local police arrived, we calmed down, but we spent many hours in uncertainty."
On the importance of going to the competition, he said: "We have more competitions to achieve the Olympic criteria for Paris and we will do our best. On days like this it was important to compete, I saw it as going to the reserves, that's our part in representing and contributing."
During the competition, an incident occurred with one of the Egyptian athletes, who refused to shake Daniel Friedman's hand. Harpa said: "This is not the first time this has happened and it's not surprising, there are some who do it for the sake of provocation, because there are those who did shake hands. In this case it is clear that he did it on purpose, I wanted to go talk to him, to confront, but we reserve our energies in order to win in the sporting arena."
Another member of the team, Yonatan Cohen, said: "We are fine now, we were on our way to the hotel until the security guards received the warning. I have never encountered such a situation before. It was unpleasant, but the security guards responded quickly, we were in a closed room for many hours and that's another experience to tell."
Cohen continued: "Nothing is stopping us, we will continue with all our might. I was also a little injured in the first fight, when my back was caught, but the main thing is that we continue to compete and represent. We didn't really get any comments there about the war, they just asked how we were, but they didn't look at us with a strange eye."
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"It was a little scary," said national team coach Alexander Ivanov. "It's unbelievable this whole story. We sat in the safe room for 6 hours and everyone was alert. When someone called our hotel and said there was a bomb, they took us back to the hall and police guarded us along with security. Now we can breathe a sigh of relief that we are already on our way back to Israel."
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