Blademasters Cup 2026 opens in Cork with sabre, longsword bouts

Blademasters Cup 2026 will turn Mahon Community Centre’s sports hall into a two-day HEMA stop, with Open Sabre on Saturday and Open Longsword on Sunday. The Cork weekend also adds a Saturday evening social and overnight gear storage, two details that should help draw traveling fencers who want to stay for the full card.

Open Sabre is set for Saturday from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and will take 36 slots. Open Longsword follows on Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. with 72 slots, giving the longsword field twice the size of sabre and making it the larger competitive draw in the hall. The format is straightforward: pool phase first, then direct elimination, with the top scorers advancing to the bracket stage.

That structure matters because it rewards consistency across the day, not just one sharp result in pools or a single upset in direct elimination. Tournament information will be handled through HEMA Scorecard, and results will be submitted to HEMA Ratings, placing the event squarely inside the broader competitive network that tracks rankings across the sport.

The venue choice carries its own significance. Blademasters Academy says it holds weekly training sessions in Cork at Mahon Community Centre, so the tournament will land on home ground for the club that is running it. Blademasters Academy describes itself as a Historical European Martial Arts club based in the south of Ireland, with branches in Cork and Limerick, and its regular curriculum includes German Longsword, military sabre and Bolognese sidesword, along with spear, polearms, dagger and ringen.

That background helps explain why the Cup is built around sabre and longsword rather than a wider mixed schedule. The same club tools students across multiple weapons, and the event gives them a chance to test that work in two of the most established open categories on the calendar. It also gives out-of-town entrants a practical reason to treat Cork as a weekend destination rather than a same-day trip.

The 2026 fields are also larger than last year’s. Blademasters Cup 2025 ran with 32 sabre slots and 64 longsword slots, and its medal table featured Colin Miraglio, Gyorgy Mogyorosi, Eoin Walker and Andrzej Rozycki. Miraglio and Rozycki both won gold across the 2025 steel events, while Mogyorosi and Walker also reached the podium, a sign that the Cork stop has already produced a field strong enough to matter in the rating system.

With bigger brackets, a same-venue training base and a built-in social night, Cork is shaping Blademasters Cup 2026 into more than a one-off meet. It is becoming a late-summer checkpoint for Irish HEMA, one that gives sabre and longsword competitors a clear weekend target in the south of Ireland.