Sport Fencing (Foil, Épée, Sabre)
An Olympic discipline with three weapons — foil, épée and sabre; on the programme of every modern Games since 1896.
Quick Facts
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Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Sport Fencing (Foil, Épée, Sabre)
Sport fencing is a modern Olympic discipline in which two fencers meet on a piste fourteen metres long and score by thrusting or cutting at the target area defined by the weapon in hand. It grew out of the European fencing tradition of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: the Italian and Spanish schools worked out the theory of distance and timing, while the French school introduced the light practice foil and the wire mask, which made it possible to train at full intent without injury and so turned a fight for life into a measurable sport. Three weapons are fenced today, each with its own rules. The foil is a thrusting weapon whose target is limited to the torso, and it follows the convention of priority: the point goes to the fencer who began the attack or parried it. The épée also thrusts, but the whole body is valid and priority does not apply, so a simultaneous hit scores for both. The sabre both cuts and thrusts, the target is everything above the waist including head and arms, and priority applies, which makes it the fastest of the three. Hits have been registered electrically since the middle of the twentieth century. The international federation, the FIE, was founded by representatives of eleven countries in Paris in 1913. Fencing is one of the five sports that have been on the programme of every modern Olympic Games since 1896.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.