If you were strolling near the Oregon Convention Center around the first week of July, you may have seen people clad in athletic gear walking around with very tall, narrow bags. Their hoodies were emblazoned with a sword, and maybe the name of some obscure North American city. Inside the bags were full cover face masks, swords, white outfits, grey vests, and weird little shoes.
Inside Hall B of the Convention Center, people in all white stood on long, short metal plates, hooked to a wire attached to a strange retracting machine, swordfighting. This was the USA Fencing Summer Nationals, the biggest fencing competition in the country. Portland was playing host for the first time in more than 70 years. Over the course of nine days, there was an overwhelming hum of chatter, clacking of swords, and screeching of shoes. Roughly 20,000 people, including a whopping 6,000 competitive fencers of all ages, were in attendance to fence, coach their charge, referee an event, talk to college representatives about scholarships, acquire soft focus swordfighter glamour shots, or snag an autograph from one of several Olympic fencers. Aside from intrepid photojournalists, there weren’t really any lookie-loos, despite the fact that anyone was welcome to watch for free. Fencing isn’t exactly lay-viewer friendly.
What is fencing? Where does it come from? Go back to the 11th Century BCE, and you’ll find archaeological evidence of competitive non-lethal dueling as far back as ancient Egypt. A literary record of something resembling, but not mimicking, the modern practice can be traced to the 14th century, when European nobles occasionally settled disputes with highly formalized rapier duels. This is when the familiar weapons, mannerisms, and scoring emerged that the sport still employs. (You may recall Hamlet fighting Laertes in a points-based duel for Ophelia’s honor.) In the 19th century, the Olympics emerged from the swamp of Pierre de Coubertin’s mind, leading to the codification of the sport of fencing as it has existed ever since.
Modern fencing encompasses three sub-disciplines, each with their own weapons, sets of rules, and scoring systems. Some things remain consistent: all white dress (harkening back to some dueling tradition or another), a narrow piste—often called a strip—where all the action takes place, saluting your opponent pre-match by tapping your swords together, receiving points for touching your opponent with the tip of your sword, and the referee initiating action by exclaiming “En Garde!” among other things.
But there are differences between the three events which comprise the sport. Daniel Baxter, the chairman of the board at Northwest Fencing Center, a non-profit fencing club in Tigard, summed it up with a pithy saying: “Epee is truth, foil is art, sabre is theater.”
“In épée—that’s the big sword—it has a bell guard, you can hit anywhere,” Baxter said. “Anyone can hit at any time, and if both hit at the same time, you both get a touch. It is what it is. If I hit you on the head, it’s going to register. If you hit me on the toe, or if we both hit together. There’s no right of way, there’s no rules, just do it.” Truth.
Foil uniforms, in addition to the standard all white outfit, feature a grey vest that covers the competitor’s torso. Fighters can only register points by hitting the vest. It’s something of a holdover from fencing’s origins as a gentleman’s sport… a “don’t touch the face” practice. “It’s classic fencing,” Baxter replied. “When you think about a thrusting weapon, foil is the most beautiful. The actions are delicate and awesome.” Art.
“Sabre is brutal. It’s a cutting weapon.” Hits are registered from the waist up. “It was the last weapon to be electrified,” says Baxter. Modern fencing swords have a slight current running through them, so they automatically register when a sword makes contact. “What would happen before it was electric, is the sabre fencers would try to convince the ref they got the touch. When they lunge, they might slap their hand on their leg. If you go into the convention hall and hear a lot of screaming, it’s coming from the sabre fencers.” Theater.
Jennifer Vernon, the programs coordinator for US Fencing, took up the sport in high school because she wanted a letterman’s jacket and thought swordfighting looked cool.
“A friend and I looked at all the different available sports, and saw these funny looking people in beekeeper outfits poking at each other, and thought, ‘That looks easy, we could do that.’ It was not easy, but we did do that and eventually both got varsity jackets.I grew up reading about knights and princesses. For me to be the knight with the sword in my hand, that was a dream come true.”
The young Vernon’s youthful view of fencing is a common way to see the sport. It just doesn’t seem like much, from the outside looking in. Two people in gigantic face masks, wiggling limp swords at each other and dancing back and forth until eventually they crash into each other and the ref declares someone has a point. Then they reset and go at each other again.
However, there’s more than meets the eye for those on the piste. People wouldn’t play the game if it was as benign as it seems.
“Fencing is very lovingly referred to as a chess-like sport,” says Vernon. “Yes, you have to be fast, you have to have good technique—but the most important component is mindset, your attitude towards it. It can be very intimidating, staring at your masked opponent who’s pointing a three-foot steel blade at you. Your human reaction is to flinch, to run and hide. You have to be aware of your body and your opponent’s body in space, listening for your coaches, while paying attention to the referee.”
Fencing tournaments are grueling affairs. It’s a long day, in a convention center, under fluorescent lights, with schedules to keep. “When I fenced,” says Vernon, “You’re always on. You’re warming up, keeping your body ready, practicing drills, going through notes on your opponents—you have people surveying your opponents, and you read up on them. Meanwhile you’re also watching other bouts, cheering on teammates or your friends, or you’re on deck, waiting to get up there. When I fenced, it was always a mid-to-high anxiety situation, because you’re always watching, waiting, and seeing.”
I asked Vernon how she learned to read the other fencers, and when she felt she understood all this on a higher level. She paused for a second, and gave an elliptical answer. “Cause and effect. It’s very basic: I do a thing, I get a reaction. I do this thing, this doesn’t happen. Or, something that I thought would happen didn’t. It’s different depending on who’s put in front of you, so it’s important to know your opponent. The fencing sphere is really small. You see the same faces, over and over again. You get to know these people. You have to know how everyone ticks, and you kinda realize, the person you were struggling against, you start learning from them. And then you start applying this knowledge. There’s never a boring moment, because you should always be watching and learning.”
Fencing is a read and react game, like chess: you put action into the world, observe how your opponent reacts to it, and adjust your approach based on their reaction. Many games, many sports have this quality to some degree. A basketball player sizes up a defender and throws a jab step their way to see how they will react, but really, it’s a team sport, and you can and usually should pass to a teammate. A boxer also relies on reading their opponent, but everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Fencing takes this universal quality in competitive games and pushes it to an extreme. When you watch a fencer wiggle their sword, or jut their foot out, it can seem so… unaffected, so slight, that you wonder if they’re doing anything at all. But they are: they’re bluffing, trying to make the other fighter reveal themselves, over and over, until it works.
“You have to move, you have to impose your will on the other person. But the other person is doing the same thing,” says Baxter. “While you’re setting up your moves, you’re trying to figure out what that other person is trying to do, and what I can do to thwart them. It’s a lot of ‘I know that you know that I know,’ sort of thing. All sorts of second guessing. At the end of an action, I might beat the blade and extend, and they might try to move it out of the way and I’ll try to disengage it, then they’ll try to beat it back. It’s all this action going on and at the end, someone has figured out how to get through. So many times when that happens, we both just crack up laughing. The action is as much a mental spar as a physical one. I think some of the best fencers are the funniest people, because they know how to see the absurdity in an action and find a way to get through it.”
If you want to learn how to fence, you can check out The Northwest Fencing Center in Tigard. They have classes for all ages. Daniel Baxter insists that an adult can learn the sport and excel with pure brainpower, and that it’s a great workout.