Fencing

Fencing

In the broadest possible sense, fencing is the art and science of armed combat involving cutting, stabbing, or bludgeoning weapons directly manipulated by hand, rather than shot or thrown (in other words, swords, knives, pikes, bayonets, batons, clubs, and so on). In contemporary common usage, fencing tends to refer specifically to European schools of swordsmanship and to the modern Olympic sport that has evolved out of them. The current modern weapons for sport fencing are the foil, épée, and sabre. The term 'Fencing' derives from the label, "The Art of Defence", meaning the art of defending one's self in combat.

Philosophies

Contemporary fencing is divided in three broad categories:
Competitive fencing
Fencing as a Western martial art
Other forms of fencing
Competitive fencing
There are three forms of competitive fencing in practice. Variations make each of them a distinct game. All three approach the activity as a sport, with varying degrees of connectedness to its historic past.
Russian Ivan Tourchine and American Weston Kelsey fence in the second round of the Men's Individual Épée event in the 2004 Summer Olympics at the Helliniko Fencing Hall on August 17, 2004.

Olympic fencing

Olympic fencing (or just "fencing") refers to the fencing seen in most competitions (including the Olympic Games). It is marked by the use of electronic scoring equipment, and conducted according to rules laid down by the Fédération Internationale d'Escrime (FIE), the sports federation governing most international fencing competitions. The current rules are very loosely based on a set of conventions developed in 18th- and 19th-century Europe to govern fencing as a martial art and a gentlemanly pursuit. The weapons used are the electric foil, electric épée, and electric sabre.

Weapons

Three weapons survive in modern competitive fencing: foil, épée, and sabre.
The spadroon and the heavy cavalry-style sabre, both of which saw widespread competitive use in the 19th century, fell into disfavour in the early 20th century with the rising popularity of the lighter and faster weapon used today, based on the Italian duelling sabre. The singlestick featured in the 1904 Olympic Games, but it was already declining in popularity by that time. Bayonet fencing was somewhat slower to decline, with competitions organized by some armed forces as late as the 1940s and 1950s. At one time, staves of various lengths, spears, halberds, axes, daggers, wrestling, shields and flails were all included in Fencing. Today these weapons are the preserve of historical fencing.
While the weapons fencers use differ in size and purpose, their basic construction remains similar across the disciplines. Every weapon has a blade and a hilt. The tip of the blade is generally referred to as the point. The hilt consists of a guard and a grip. The guard (also known as the coquille, or the bellguard) is a metal shell designed to protect the fingers. The grip is the weapon's actual handle. There are a number of commonly used variants (see grip (sport fencing)). The more traditional kind tend to terminate with a pommel, a heavy nut intended to act as a counterweight for the blade.

Foil

The foil is a light and flexible weapon, originally developed in the mid 17th century as a training weapon for the court sword (a light one-handed sword designed almost exclusively for thrusting). It is the weapon that, traditionally, many students practice first. Hits can be scored only by hitting the valid target surface with the point of the weapon. The target area is restricted to the torso. A touch on an off-target area stops the bout, but does not score a point. There are "right of way" conventions or priority rules, whose basic idea is that the first person to create a viable threat or the last person to defend successfully receives a "right" to hit. If two hits arrive more or less simultaneously, only the fencer who had the "right of way" receives a point. If priority cannot be assigned unambiguously, no points are awarded. The basic idea behind the foil rules was, originally, to encourage the defence of one's vital areas, and to fence in a methodical way with initiative passing back and forth between the two fencers and no last-minute counter-attacks ---- which risk a double death.

Épée

Like the foil, the épée is a thrusting weapon: to score a valid hit, the fencer must fix the point of his weapon on his opponent's target. However, épée lacks the foil's most artificial conventions: the restricted target area and the priority rules. In épée, a hit can be scored by landing a hit anywhere on the opponent's body. The fencer whose hit lands first receives the point, irrespective of what happened in the preceding phrase. If two hits arrive simultaneously (within 40 milliseconds of each other), a double hit is recorded, and both fencers get a point (except for in modern pentathlon one-hit épée, where neither fencer receives a point).

Sabre

A sabre fencer. Valid target (everything from the waist up, including the arms and head) is in red (exception: The hands, which are shown in red, are not valid targets).
The sabre is the "cutting" weapon, with a curved guard and a triangular blade. However, in modern electric scoring, a touch with any part of the sabre, point, flat or edge, as long as it is on target, will register a hit.

Protective clothing

The complete fencing kit includes the following items of clothing:
Form-fitting jacket, covering groin and with strap (croissard) which goes between the legs, a small gorget of folded fabric is also sewn in around the collar to prevent a blade from slipping upwards towards the neck.
Under-arm protector (plastron) which goes underneath the jacket and provides double protection on the sword arm side and upper arm. It is required to not have a seam in the armpit, which would line up with the jacket seam and provide a weak spot.
Glove, with a gauntlet that prevents swords going up the sleeve and causing injury, as well as protecting the hand and providing a good grip
Breeches, which are a pair of trousers. The legs are supposed to hold just below the knee.
Knee-length socks, which cover the rest of the leg.
Mask, including a bib which protects the neck. For competition, the bib must be sewn into the mask frame to eliminate a hole that might admit a blade. Thus, masks with snap-in bibs are not legal for competition. The mask can usually support 12 kilograms of force, however FIE regulation masks can stand much more, at least 25 kg. Plastic chest protector, mandatory for female fencers. While male versions are also available, they were, until recently, primarily worn by instructors, who are hit far more often during training than their students. Since the change of the depression timing, these are increasingly popular in foil, as the hard surface increases the likelihood of point bounce and thus a failure for a hit to register. Plastrons are still mandatory, though.