The MATE-GEAC fencing hall was officially inaugurated on Saturday as part of a naming ceremony. A competition was held in Gödöllő’s new fencing hall a year ago, but the official inauguration had to wait until now, primarily because of the coronavirus epidemic – the website of the Hungarian sports association reported.
Caution was important if only because one of the hall’s namesakes is the old master, the 88-year-old Sándor Batizi, who was, among other things, the coach of the Olympic champion Imre Bujdosó – wrote hunfencing.hu.
Eight competition arenas were built in the hall that now serves as the Batizi-Benkő Vívócsarnok. The facility was built with a budget of more than HUF 600 million, of which HUF 525 million was provided by the Hungarian Fencing Association (MVSZ) thanks to the government’s sports development program.
The plot and the additional amount were added by the Gödöllő municipality. At the hall inauguration on Saturday afternoon, the mayor of the city, former national team fencer György Gémesi, who was the president of the MVSZ for a decade, dressed in fencing clothes again. He improvised a school with his former coach, Sándor Batizi, so that the fencing master was visually impaired and neither of them had held a sword in their hands for years. After that, Zsolt Csampa, the president of the MVSZ, gave a speech. He emphasized that thanks to the government’s sports development program, “another great hall could be inaugurated”. He said that even in the current situation, which is not easy at all, he sees the situation of fencing at home as secured. György Gémesi said his greetings as a multiple stakeholder, as he is the only fencer who was a student of the hall’s two namesakes, Tibor Benkő, the founder of Gödöllő fencing, and Sándor Batizi. His nephew, Csánád Gémesi, the Olympic bronze, world championship silver and European championship gold medalist, who hosted the opening ceremony, emphasized: until now they tried to keep up with the other associations in the corridor, in the basement, but now a new era begins in the life of MATE-GEAC .
MTI
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