Albion Cup 2026 crowns champions across six HEMA weapon divisions
Sipilä and Vasarainen left Albion Cup with double crowns, and the same names kept surfacing across longsword, saber and rapier. The Marlow card now reads like a summer pecking-order shift.
Eetu Sipilä and Minna Vasarainen turned Albion Cup 2026 into a statement weekend, each leaving Marlow with multiple titles and a clear edge in the British-circuit pecking order. Sipilä won open longsword Tier A and open saber Tier A, while Vasarainen topped the women’s-plus longsword and women’s-plus saber fields, a sweep that immediately gave EHMS the loudest bragging rights from the card.
The biggest results were stacked at the top of the ladders. In open longsword Tier A, Sipilä beat Bohdan Donchenko of Akademia Szermierzy, with Ville Välimäki of EHMS and Vasarainen of EHMS filling out the podium. In saber Tier A, Sipilä again finished first, ahead of Pedro San Miguel, Henric Hintze and Mateusz Leksander. Vasarainen’s wins were just as clean: she led Irene Caldi, Kelsey Dame and Marcjanna Jelińska in women’s-plus longsword, then repeated over Alyson Duffy, Marcjanna Jelińska and Caldi in women’s-plus saber.
Albion Cup’s depth showed up in the B tiers and in the repeat names that threaded through multiple weapons. David Christie won open longsword Tier B ahead of Charles Django, Nicholas Pirot and Sebastian Tym. Pavel Grussmann took saber Tier B, with Conall Ross, Christie and Faiz Rahman next. In rapier, Henric Hintze won open Tier A over Sipilä, Luigi Simone Menichino and Max van den Ekart, while Steven Gallagher topped Tier B ahead of Sophie Evans, Sebastian Mitel and David Rybacki. Sipilä, Vasarainen, Christie, Hintze and Jelińska all appeared more than once, the mark of a field where the best all-rounders kept colliding across divisions.
That breadth is why Albion Cup carried extra weight beyond a routine summer meet. HEMA Scorecard listed Albion Cup 2026 as a recent event in Marlow, England, and its event-status system notes that placings can remain provisional until organizers finalize them and validate the results. The Albion Cup name already had heft: the 2024 archive described it as the UK’s top international tournament, hosted near Heathrow Airport with eight tournaments across three weapons. This year’s scorecard kept that reputation intact, and the repeated podiums from Sipilä and Vasarainen made the strongest case that the pecking order is already shifting.
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