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On Sunday in Paris, with a flick of her wrist and a whoop of joy, Lee Kiefer, a 30-year-old medical student, made history by becoming the first American fencer to win back-to-back gold medals in foil at the Olympics. Kiefer made her task look easy. She eliminated her opponent, American fencer Lauren Scruggs, in less than three minutes, scoring the required 15 touches with 40 seconds left in the first of three possible periods. “What an incredible moment,” said commentator Karim Bashir as Kiefer and Scruggs took to the track after the match, joined by their respective coaches, waving American flags to a cheering crowd.What moment for the United States.
Celebrating Kiefer’s achievement doesn’t diminish Scruggs’ efforts. Indeed, with her second-place finish, Scruggs became the only American woman to win silver in a foil event, and only the fifth American woman to win silver. any of them Individual Olympic medalist in fencing. A Harvard student and Queens native, she was competing in her first Olympics as a black athlete in a sport traditionally dominated by white competitors. Scruggs wasn’t necessarily expected to medal in Paris. But she powered through the preliminary rounds, knocked off world No. 2 Arianna Errigo of Italy in the quarterfinals and eventually found herself on the podium. Now, her silver medal, along with Kiefer’s gold, has put American fencing back in the spotlight after years in the shadows and given the sport a new chance to find the audience it deserves.
Americans have not had much luck in Olympic fencing. Until recently, in fact, Americans had not won Olympic gold in fencing since the Roosevelt administration.Theodore Roosevelt, that is. In 1904, a team of fencers led by the immortal Albertson Van Zo Post, brother-in-law of etiquette doyenne Emily Post, and later the author of a book that was made into a silent film in 1919 Satan Junior—and Charles Tatham, a 50-year-old tycoon, won 10 medals at that year’s St. Louis Games. For 100 years, until Mariel Zagunis won gold in women’s sabre in 2004, Post’s gold medal in single-stick fencing stood alone gold that American fencers, men and women, had ever won individually Olympic fencing event. (It was also the only gold medal that anybody (The event, in which competitors performed with a thin wooden cane, presumably in the manner of the soft-shoe vaudeville dancers popular at the time, debuted at the St. Louis Games and was discontinued immediately thereafter.)
It’s not entirely clear why the United States has always been so bad at fencing. It probably doesn’t help that American history is full of tales of rogue aristocrats dueling in castles while dancing on spiral staircases and/or swinging from elaborate chandeliers. Firearms, not blades, have long been the American specialty, and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the U.S. team has absolutely dominated the various Olympic shooting sports.
But a simpler explanation is that failure breeds failure. The fact that America rarely wins at fencing helps limit fencing’s media exposure, making it difficult for people to watch it. At the same time, low expectations and a general lack of interest are likely holding back the development of the kind of national educational infrastructure that could make American fencers more competitive. There are martial arts studios in every other city in America. But where could you and I go? go If we wanted to learn how to fence? The library?
As a result, fencing has become an ultra-niche sport and, perhaps unfairly, has developed a reputation as a sport dominated by overachieving elite athletes. Kiefer is a Notre Dame graduate and pre-med student. Scruggs is a senior at Harvard. The other American foil competitor, Jackie Dubrovich, graduated from Columbia with a triple major in psychology, human rights, and Russian literature and culture. “I got interested in fencing because I was too skinny and uncoordinated for dance and gymnastics,” Dubrovich noted on her official USA Fencing page. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many young fencers pursue the sport at least in part for college application purposes. (You may recall that in 2020, Peter Brand, then a fencing coach at Harvard, was indicted on charges that a wealthy relative bribed him to recruit his sons to the fencing team. Brand and the relative were ultimately acquitted.)
American fencers can sometimes seem like those students who only take up fencing because their school doesn’t have a Quidditch team. And yet, this nerd reputation strikes me as crazy, because fencing is literally sword fighting, and there are few things on Earth cooler than sword fighting. What’s better than sword fighting? Baseball? Damn baseball! I’d like to see your precious Jesse Winker come to the plate with a sabre instead of a bat. He wouldn’t even know the difference between a parry and a riposte, and he’d probably get eliminated. And where was I? Oh yeah, the Olympics.
I was both thrilled and disoriented watching the gold-medal foil match on Sunday afternoon. The most exciting part was the swordplay and the athletic intensity that Scruggs and Kiefer displayed as they jousted on the piste: their precise movements, their impressive reflexes. The most disorienting part was the sport itself: the rules, the scoring, the reasons why the fencers were tethered to long wires attached to their buttocks. For a fencing spectator in a car, watching a match is a bit like watching a foreign-language movie without subtitles. It’s easy to get the gist of what’s going on, but hard to know exactly what’s going on.
This disorientation is easily remedied. It doesn’t take much work to add contextual and explanatory content to a televised fencing match so that novices can understand what they’re seeing. Nor does it take much imagination to see how an adapted version of fencing could be transformed into an exciting television show. Just add a little Mortal Combat aesthetics — you know, a few smoke machines, a few sound effects, maybe a guy yelling “Finish her!” just before the final touches are made — and a few pro wrestling-style announcers, and you have a show that is at least as compelling as Combat robots.
But beyond the added context and improved production values, what fencing really needs are stars: top-level competitors who can also serve as ambassadors for the sport and show that it’s for everyone, not just aristocrats and nerds. Kiefer and Scruggs, young, talented, diverse and decked out in Olympic medals, are perfectly suited to fill those roles. Albertson Van Zo Post: Lee and Lauren are here to help American fencing reach a new goal time.