[desmond001]

What the Olympics tells us about the state of world fencing

For me, the biggest thing was that France was struggling, but French-trained fencers (Abouelkassim, Fernandez, Ali, Samandi, both the Besbes girls, apparently the Koreans too) were doing rather well.

Similarly the smaller Eastern European countries picked up few medals outside of sabre, but then you look at all the fencers who have coaches from those nations (Limardo, Ota, Piasecki, several Americans, obviously Kruse, Halsted and Davis too).

The message seems to be that all of these coaching schools are still as strong as the Italians', it's just whether they find themselves in an administrative system/economic situation which is conducive to producing good fencers.

We should look at the countries which run on a similar economic model to us in terms of taxation, wealth, state vs corporate vs private investment in sport and sport administration and then of those countries, look at which ones are good at fencing and find out who's coaching them.