LOVE AND WAR: COUPLE TEACH ARMORED COMBAT»
Colorado Springs couple train armored fighters to compete
Janeal Tyler lunged at him with a blade. Nicholas Sumpter swung his sword at her like a baseball bat.
They traded blows for five minutes, thrusting and jabbing in a violent melee until Sumpter yielded and the 6-foot woman in chain mail prevailed.
It was June 2011 at an armored combat tournament in Colorado Springs. Tyler had triumphed, and went to shake hands with the burly man she had defeated. The two strangers struck up a conversation.
“It took some hardcore flirting on my part,” Tyler joked, “but I eventually convinced him to ask for my number.”
The two began dating, and in February 2016 they married. The wedding had a medieval theme. For a bouquet, Tyler covered a sword in flowers.
They honeymooned that May in Portugal at the International Medieval Combat Federation World Championship, where Tyler — who captained the USA Women’s Team — and Sumpter both took home gold.
Now, six years after their first shared bout in armored combat fighting, the internationally recognized warriors have changed their last name to Ironside.
“We went back and forth for a year on medieval names that suited us,” Janeal explains. “We found a name on the show ‘Vikings’ that we loved: Ironside. We discovered it had been a popular name for armored fighters
for centuries.”
In May, the couple opened Ironside Medieval Combat, a martial arts school in Colorado Springs, where they train a new generation of medieval mercenaries to compete in the Armored Combat League, an MMA-style sport in which heavily clad competitors clobber one another with real steel blades.
“We now have more than 400 fighters in the U.S. and international leagues that have started in Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Japan and New Zealand” said Andre Sinou, who co-founded the ACL in February 2012. “We’re now growing exponentially. It’s a worldwide phenomenon.”
Sinou is a retired Marine Corps officer who lives in southern New Jersey. Unlike military combat, armored combat offers physical thrills in a safe environment replete with competitive rewards.
Participants don 60 to 80 pounds of armor — iron helmets, pauldrons, protective gauntlets and metal breastplates — before entering the ring, where fighters mash one another with a lethal assemblage of axes, maces, swords, pole-arms, winged spears and hammers. Striking edges must be rounded, and all weapons have to conform to their historical analogues.
Matches can be as intimate as one-on-one or as large as 16-on16. Competitors are eliminated when they submit or have three points of contact on the ground. The feet always count as two points of contact, and the third can come from a hand, knee, weapon or shield used as a crutch.
The league, which operates under the International Medieval Combat Federation, models itself after other competitive sports leagues like the NFL or MLB. Chapter teams attached to a city compete in 10 regional subdivisions. The regions then pull the best fighters from local chapters for 10 regional teams, which divide evenly at the Mississippi River into two conferences, East and West.
The best fighters from the regional teams are selected to compete internationally for the American national team, the USA Knights, against roughly 28 other countries with leagues of their own.
A minimum of three participants are needed to start a new chapter team, which are now in 41 American cities from Des Moines to New York, Santa Barbara to New Haven.
In the first few years, league tournaments attracted only a few dozen spectators, according to Sinou. Now, thousands come out for the major contests. Renaissance fairs near major metros typically draw overflow crowds. The 2017 international competition, held in Denmark in May, attracted more than 3,000 onlookers.
The brutal sport isn’t for the faint-hearted and can inflict bodily damage, from light bruises to one incident of a skull fracture. (The injured fighter got up and walked himself to the ambulance.) To mitigate harm, the league requires participants wear armor, follow a number of regulations governing sportsmanship and technical violations; and not hit outside the “legal strike zone,” which excludes the feet, back of the knees, groin, throat and back of the neck.
Trained referees judge all and wield power to discipline unlawful fighters. Informal codes of conduct carry more clout, deterring improper behavior before the fact.
“We don’t tolerate any trashtalking. It’s not like MMA or boxing where you have the whole show of trash talking. It’s not culturally accepted here,” said Jaye Brooks, an ACL cofounder who lives in New Hampshire. “We have a brotherhood of knights. We want to give respect to anyone who competes, because it’s dangerous and it’s difficult.”
That brotherhood includes about 50 women who “are treated like queens,” according to Janeal Ironside. In the United States, the competition doesn’t separate by gender or weight class, “so you can have total opposites fighting,” she added. “Being larger does give you an admatches vantage. Having a good martial arts background can be essential.”
Each year, the expanding army of American combatants also becomes younger, according to Brooks. In 2012, the average age of fighters was 47. Five years later, that number has fallen to 34.
The co-founder attributes the precipitous drop-off to a rapid influx of twentysomethings.
“I’m very excited by it because it means that we’re succeeding getting across our message that this is a modern sport,” he said. “There’s all kinds of reenacting groups out there, and they’re less expensive than us because we have to spend so much money on armor and equipment. But we’re getting more and more young, athletic people, and the sport’s better for it.”
Social media plays a role as well. The Armored Combat League relies on Facebook to communicate and organize matches, meet-ups and tournaments. Most chapter teams, like the Denver Tempest of the Northwest Region, have Facebook pages for fans and fighters to stay apprised on news and events.
Gyms like Ironside Medieval Combat also utilize social network platforms to reach participants. Though the Colorado contingent remains small, the Ironsides estimate that their efforts have raised the number of fighters statewide by more than 50 percent in just two months, largely due to school and festival demonstrations and classes at their gym in Colorado Springs.
On Sept. 16, the Ironside school will host its first ACL tournament between the Denver Tempest and Wild Bunch of Louisville, Ky. The Ironsides hope the matchup will be an opportunity to showcase the martial arts school — and its defining pastime — for a Colorado audience.
“Nothing builds friendship like combat sport,” Sinou said. “The ACL is a sport where you come out and give it your all out of respect for your opponent. And you expect your opponent to give their best possible fight, too. Then, at the end, you pick each other up, dust each other off, share a hug and head out to dinner together. We’re a family.”