How Does Fencing Work? Right of Way, Three Weapons and Electric Scoring

The sport has three events, each with its own weapon, target and rules:

• •Foil: a light thrusting weapon, descended from the practice sword of the eighteenth century; the target is the torso only, front and back, and hits count only with the point; right of way applies
• •Epee: a heavier thrusting weapon, descended from the duelling sword; the whole body is target, hits count only with the point, and there is no right of way, so if both fencers hit within a twenty-fifth of a second both score, which is what happened in a real duel
• •Sabre: a cutting and thrusting weapon, descended from the cavalry sword; the target is everything above the waist, hits count with the edge as well as the point, and right of way applies; it is the fastest of the three, with bouts often over in a minute

In foil and sabre a hit is awarded not to whoever touched first but to whoever had priority, and priority belongs to the fencer who attacks first, defined as extending the arm with the point threatening the target while moving forward. The defender regains priority by parrying, deflecting the blade, and may then riposte; the attacker can regain it by beating the opponent's blade aside, or by the attack failing and a new one being launched. If both fencers hit and the referee judges that both had equal claim, neither scores. The rule exists because the weapons were designed to teach people not to be killed: a fencer who lunges into an oncoming attack may land a touch and would have been run through, and the convention awards the point to the one who did the sensible thing. Epee, which was meant to reproduce the duel exactly, dropped the convention and lets both fencers bleed.

Hits were judged by eye and by a jury of four until the 1930s, and the arguments were constant. Epee went electric at the 1936 Olympics, foil in 1956 and sabre in 1988: the blade carries a wire, a spring-loaded tip completes a circuit when pressed with enough force, 750 grams in epee and 500 in foil, and the fencer wears a conductive jacket, the lame, over the valid target so that the box can tell a valid hit from one on the leg or the mask. Coloured lights show who was hit and where; in foil and sabre the referee then applies right of way and awards the touch, and in epee the box decides alone. A body cord runs from the weapon up the sleeve to a reel behind the fencer, and the piste, the metal strip, is earthed so that a hit on the floor registers nothing.

Bouts are to five touches in the early rounds of a competition and to fifteen, over three periods of three minutes, in the direct elimination that follows. The fencers advance and retreat along the piste, and a fencer driven off the end concedes a touch; the footwork, the advance, retreat, lunge and the running attack called the fleche, is what the years of training are mostly about, since the hand is fast in everyone and the feet decide who arrives. A fencer who turns their back, uses the unarmed hand, or crosses the feet in sabre is penalised with a yellow card and then a red, which gives a touch to the opponent. The referee's calls, in French, attaque, parade, riposte, touche, are the sport's language, since the rules were codified in France and the international federation was founded in Paris in 1913.

Fencing schools taught the sword as a weapon from the fifteenth century, in Italy, Spain and then France, and the rapier of the duel gave way in the seventeenth century to the lighter smallsword and to the foil, a blunted practice weapon with a button on the point, on which the conventions of the modern sport were built; the mask, invented around 1780, made it possible to fence fast without losing an eye. The duel was outlawed across Europe in the nineteenth century and fencing survived as a sport, at the first modern Olympics of 1896 and every one since. Its stars have included Aldo Nadi, who fought a real duel in 1924 and wrote about it, and the Hungarian sabreurs who won the individual Olympic title at every Games from 1908 to 1964 except 1920; the sport is now strong in Italy, France, Hungary, Russia, South Korea and the United States, and the piste, the mask and the salute are the same as they were when the point of it was to walk away.

Fencing has an excellent safety record, but it was reshaped by one accident. At the 1982 world championships in Rome, the Soviet foilist Vladimir Smirnov, the reigning Olympic champion, was struck by an opponent's blade that snapped during an exchange; the broken end went through the mesh of his mask and into his brain, and he died days later. The inquiry that followed changed the equipment. Blades began to be made from maraging steel, an alloy that breaks less often and tends to break more cleanly rather than leaving a jagged point, and masks and clothing were strengthened to much higher standards.

Modern kit is certified by the force it can resist. Competition jackets, breeches and the underarm protector worn beneath the jacket on the weapon side are made from materials tested to withstand a set puncture force measured in newtons, with international events requiring stronger ratings than club fencing, and masks must pass a test in which a spike is pressed against the mesh. When a blade breaks during a bout, the fencer holding it must stop at once, since continuing to attack with a broken weapon is dangerous. The result is a combat sport in which serious injuries are rare, even though blades move faster than the eye can easily follow.

Roughly one person in ten is left-handed, yet at the top of fencing the share is much higher, and studies of world championship fields have found left-handers making up around a third of some events. The usual explanation is familiarity. A right-handed fencer spends most of their training facing other right-handers, so their parries, distances and expectations are tuned to an opponent whose blade arrives from one side. A left-hander's attacks come from the direction a right-hander has practised against least, and on the narrow piste, where fencers stand side-on, the open lines of the target are mirrored.

The left-hander, meanwhile, faces right-handers all the time and is rarely surprised by them. The advantage is therefore described as frequency-dependent: it exists because left-handers are scarce, and it would shrink if they became common, since everyone would then train against them. The same pattern appears in other one-against-one sports such as boxing, table tennis and baseball pitching, but not in sports such as swimming or gymnastics, where there is no opponent to wrong-foot. Some biologists have suggested that a similar edge in fights could help explain why left-handedness has persisted in humans at all, though that idea remains debated.

Fencing has given English several words that now live outside the salle. Touche, the French for touched, was called out to acknowledge a hit, and people now say it to concede a good point in an argument. A riposte is a counter-attack made immediately after parrying an opponent's attack, and the word now means any quick, sharp reply.

Parry, meaning to deflect an attack, has also moved into general use for dodging a difficult question, and to cross swords with someone now means simply to argue. These borrowings reflect how widely fencing was practised among the educated classes in earlier centuries, when duelling and swordsmanship were part of a gentleman's training, and how naturally its vocabulary suited the back-and-forth of debate.

Fencing is a bout with a blunted foil, epee or sabre on a fourteen-metre strip, scored electrically when a weapon completes a circuit on the opponent's target, the torso for foil, the whole body for epee and everything above the waist for sabre. In foil and sabre a hit counts only for the fencer with right of way, the priority that comes from attacking first or from parrying, a rule inherited from the practice of not being killed; epee lets both score. The sport descends from the duelling schools and has been in every modern Olympics.