PRESIDENT's BULLETIN

Preparation for the Novice Nationals started for real in late august. The venue was booked 11 months ago with various arrangements made over the year gradually which are now boring to talk about & even less interesting to hear. Novice Nationals are the most difficult & onerous of all the events I have ever organised in & out of armwrestling.

There is a lot of hope & I feel it in the weeks leading up. I don't find it fun. There are so many things to get wrong & even more outside of any sort of control. Despite best efforts many things went wrong. In the scheme of things they are minor, but for the people it affects it's significant. Some people got left out of the running order. Others ended up on the wrong side of the bracket & so did not achieve what they might have done. A success is to do the thing you set out to do with no mistakes - & again I did not achieve that. I'm not happy about it at all.

The rules for competition require a lot of preparation & attention. We state it's for over 18's, UK resident of 5 years or more & we have a well advertised definition of what a novice is. Still under 18's try to enter. People who have competed at a high levels in other countries previously or have been hanging around indefinitely knowing full well that they are not novices. They are out to smash the new youngsters to gain status. People who know they have not been in the country five years pretend they have. I've spent far too many hours these past few weeks trying to detect them - I think about a dozen were prevented from competing in the end. Probably a few slipped through again. It's exhausting & distracts from the genuine victories & progression. Those of us who run the show didn't intend to be immigration status specialists, detectives or data analysts. That's what I've been though these past few weeks in attempting to make the competition fair. Again, I ask myself why bother. I'm a volunteer with plenty of other things to do.

160 pullers competed in our Novice Nationals over the weekend & I reckon another hundred herd followers attended to watch. 39 pullers were in the 86kg Right hand class alone, which is the biggest category to date. A wonderful team of helpers gave up their time to oversee it all & I'm very proud of the effort they gave to make it work. We have created new champions. Some of the hope I mentioned earlier has come to fruition & hard work for some has been rewarded. There is luck too - sometimes it's your day & sometimes it ain't. Whether successful or not there is always more work to do. Be better prepared & conditioned for next time & when you stumble, fall forwards.

A while back Vice President Atom Bomb Tom Atherton suggested that the regional warzones should be a league for points with a belt for the winner. Without advertising it was going, points were added up during the year - 10 points for a first place on either arm, 9 for second & so on for all 6 finalists. Reuben Hughes was the winner by a country mile. He didn't know that until Tom presented him with the 2025 WARZONE ROAD WARRIOR CHAMPIONSHIP belt during the break between heats & left arm finals. He gets to keep that belt forever. One has been made for 2026 & the full details of how it will work will be shared in the coming weeks.

Elsewhere I'm told that James Wall is the new Sheriff of Arizona & that we also had a contingent of the UK in Switzerland, some competing, others not. Alan Milne won a Gold & Silver at the IFA WORLDS in BAKU, Thomas Lilley was 6th in both his classes & I'm sure in the next week the tales will come from each of the three continents that they visited.

Work continues preparing for the Pro Nationals. Some improvements are to be made after a review of the weekend & also some discussion of what next year's landscape will look like are ongoing.

The website is going to be untidy for a few days whilst updates take place.

See you down the road.