Kristine Rinka tops HEMA women’s steel sabre June 2026 rankings
Kristine Rinka held off Minna Vasarainen atop a 349-entry women’s steel sabre board, a list deep enough to show real multinational weight behind the category.
Kristine Rinka opened June as the woman to beat in HEMA women’s steel sabre, holding the top spot on a 349-entry board with a weighted rating of 1,878.8. Minna Vasarainen of EHMS stayed close behind at 1,859.6, and the gap at the front never looked like the product of a one-country ladder.
That is the real edge in this ranking: the depth is not just at the top, it runs through the whole table. The first eight names alone spread across HEMA Riga, EHMS, Noble Science Academy, Dawn Duellists Society, CounterTime, Akademia Szermierzy, HEMA Ravenna and Twerchhau e.V., with Rashelle DeBolt, Alyson Duffy, Elena Muzurina, Irina Olbrychska, Alessandra Ghedini and Melissa Kleiß all inside the early chase pack. In a category that dense, a bad weekend does not exile a fighter from relevance, and a strong run can move someone through a crowded middle before the next update lands.
HEMA Ratings’ model is built to capture that kind of movement. It says it collects results from as many HEMA tournaments as possible and turns them into performance ratings using the Glicko-2 system created by Mark Glickman. The site’s weighted rating is not raw output; it is score minus twice the deviation, a conservative, confidence-adjusted number meant to reflect not just who has the best results, but who has the most reliable ones.
The June board also shows that women’s steel sabre is being fed by live event volume, not just legacy seeding. The June 12 PL HEMA League: Black Horns Cup 2026 logged 62 fighters in Women’s Steel Sabre, while the June 20 Alberio Kalavijas IV 2026 recorded 14 fights and 5 fighters in the same category. Those are the sort of event counts that keep a rankings ecosystem honest, because they create enough head-to-head data for the board to keep shifting.
The active pool reinforces the point. HEMA Ratings listed 222 active fighters in women’s steel sabre for June 2026, with 211 on the main island and 11 spread across three islands. Ten fighters had already spent as long on an island as they had been active in the category, which means the board has reached the kind of stability where the next round of results can still reshuffle it without breaking it.
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