How Big is Fencing in your country?

[Dictator Frost]

I was wondering how popular the sport of fencing really is internationally, and I know this site represents quite a few countries so I'd like to ask you how popular fencing is in your country.

I know here in America it isn't very big. I mean there are lots of people who fence but it nothing like main stream sports like basketball or football. The only time I see it on TV is once every eight years when the Summer Olympics come around and I'm only 16!

[Nusy]

Summer Olympics come in ever 4 years...
In Hungary it's a very successful Olympic sport, but no more. Few people know about it, even less do it.

[Purple Fencer]

Originally Posted by Nusy

Summer Olympics come in ever 4 years...
In Hungary it's a very successful Olympic sport, but no more. Few people know about it, even less do it.

Wow...even though Hungary pretty much owned sabre for decades??

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!


In my 9-million population country, the National Sports Federation organizes 67 different sports federations, which have a total of 22000 clubs under them. A total of 3 million people are members in at least one sports federation. The biggest, soccer, has 3275 clubs totaling about a million members. Fencing, in contrast, has 50 clubs with a total of 3400 members. This makes fencing (club-wise) the 59th largest sport in Sweden, with sports such as baseball (50), american football (52), bob/luge(43), and tug-o-war(46) closeby.

Fencing is covered in Swedish media each Olympics. Other than that, I can only remember once when fencing made the national papers on sports results alone - when both bronzes in the European ME went to Sweden. Fencing clubs get covered once in a blue moon by local media when they want something out of the ordinary. One of the largest and best fencing clubs in Sweden happens to be located in the regional capital of the smallest region, and since the local news scene is not that hot, fencing regularily makes it to the sports pages of the local paper.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Nusy]

In our 10-million country we have less than 1000 licenced fencers (not counting the recreational fencers) and 58 clubs listed (though, some are "ON PAUSE" for at least a year or so...)

[LUDICROUS]

Originally Posted by Nusy

In our 10-million country we have less than 1000 licenced fencers (not counting the recreational fencers) and 58 clubs listed (though, some are "ON PAUSE" for at least a year or so...)

Registered on the FENZ (fencing new zealand) website is 17 clubs. Thats across the whole country. However, that doesnt include school "clubs" that the school has done when coaches come in after school to teach. But, there isn't too many of those, either.

Less than 1% of the country fences, like everywhere else!

[Dictator Frost]

opps,you're right 4 . Thanks guys that's very interesting, you'd think sword fighting would be a lot more popular than throwing around a ball.

[EdS!]

In my country (Brazil) fencing isn't popular .But have people who play for a long time.The best brazilian fencer was Elora who some years ago got second place in the worldchampionship.In the last Olympics games we send 3 fencers to play(2 of sabre and 1 of floret).
Bye

[LordTofuDog-jnr]

We get less coverage in Aus for fencing than for lawn bowls. Seriously, ABC is always showing lawn bowls. (It helps that half of the world's best are in Aus, oh jeez, I've watched it enough to know! ARGH!)

[jjrenaud]

In France we've actually a little bit more than 60000 fencers, some peoples says around 70000, but i'm not quite sure about that, i'll wait the officila declaration of our federation to know exactly.
Even we've some result, not so bad in fact, fencing isn't a big sport(even we're the sport who had give to France the most of olympic medals)...everyone seem to discover fencing every 4 years, and sometimes if we are lucky and the french TV give some reports about worldchampionship we could could dream to get more people.
Hopefully a lot of fencing masters are working in the school and do a great job, and take some kids to fencing.
we've more than 700 fencing clubs, but to be realistic a lot are between 5 and 30 peoples.

[Klingy]

In Israel (5 Million population) We have something about 800 Fencers and about 10 clubs! Our Federation got no money, but we still have many great Fencers mostly juniors! Great Eepe and Foil! Sabre is still not that good here.

[Lemberg]

In Canada it's quite small and the media prefers to cover professional sports over anything amateur ..... especially fencing. We had some coverage of the world cup last march, but it was along the lines of "can you imagine? there's a world cup of fencing happening in vancouver! did you guys even know there are actual fencing competitions????" Although following teh Olympics, where did have at least one person in each weapon (weapon, not gender) one particular fencer has been getting quiet a lot of coverage and thus promoting teh sport a bit. That, of course, is Sherraine MacKay who happens to be both one of the top womens' epeeists in the world and a really great looking woman. So she's been on a whole bunch of TV/radio shows, which is great.....
As to teh numbers.. have no idea really.. It's much bigegr in Quebec than anywhere else, and the Nationals draw about 60-90 fencers for every Open event (except WS which is much smaller).... But in terms of results, we have really been a one-trick pony... Epee is by far the strongest weapon - at the Challenge Monal we had 5 or 6 fencers in top 64 and two in 32s .. and of course the women's team finished 4th at the olympics..... There is, of course, Michel Boulos who is consistently somewhere in the lower part of the top 32 of Men's Sabre World Cup points, and Josh McGuire who's not a bad foilist, but other than that, it's all epee.

[Alain]

Don't quote me on these...

I believe that in France there are 10x as many fencers than in Britain. Also (and I'm not sure if this is still relevant), in France fencing is the 30th most practiced sport, but the third most "médaillé" (errr, "medalled"??).

Although fencing still remains a minority sport in Britain, it has definately picked up recently and competitions are getting bigger and stronger

[angriff]

Over in Singapore fencing is a minority sport.. unfortunately. We've a population of about 3.5 million IIRC, but only about 600 fencers of all age groups. There are 3-4 major clubs, plus about 12 other school, varsity and institute teams. We've a couple of competitions organised each year that are open to foreigners, notably the annual Fencing Singapore International which has seen fencers from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia (I believe Zelda from this board was here last year?) etc. Come on down and join in the fun this year!

[VELISARIOS]

In Greece fencing is minor sport. We have only 10 to 12 clubs (I thing so). But now we have a small advansment (if you think that 2 weeks ago we have in 'Acropolis' competition and TV).

[Purple Fencer]

Wow...I don;t feel so bad about coverage in the US anymore!!!

The number of USFA members is in the high 10,000s....maybe the low 20,000s...but that doesn;t account for the number of people who fence for fun or a workout, but don;t compete.

[the ancient one]

I was playing with membership data back in May:

USFA 18,806 competitive members = 5676 female + 13,130 male
1345 non-competitive members

mens foil ratings 148 A's, 266 B's, 501 C's, 716 D's, 1044 E's
mens epee ratings 301 A's, 452 B's, 525 C's, 1120 D's, 766 E's
then I got bored and stopped.

I am suprised that Hungary has only 1000 or so members. That kills any attempt to explain dominance in the World Cups as a function of the number of active fencers within a country.

[Fencergrl]

In Canada there's about 3500 registered members, with about 500 in BC. Having said that, I know there's a lot of fencers who don't register.

As registering is quite cheap... to be a CFF member is $10... it's a real shame. Our organizations Nationally and Provincially are always trying to get funding. The higher the numbers, the more funding you're able to receive.

By not registering it makes it harder for the organizations to function.

[BoutAfrica]

South Africa is probably one of the worse off countries. There are maybe 10 clubs in the country of which only 3 really count. An average tournament has about 16 fencers and it just seems to decline. I m guessing that there are some where between 200 - 300 registered fencers in the country but that may be pushing it. There are only 5 foreign coaches (that I know about) who seem to do all the work. Not only is the local competition week but our fencers have almost no international experience as we are so far away from every where and most people can only afford to go to one international competition a year.
There is absolutely no funding for the sport with the exception of the upcoming Africa Games.
Media coverage is zero and pubic awareness is about the same. The only media coverage i have seen are tiny little badly written clips from small local newspapers, some photo's from the Olympics showing a fencing leaping in the air (Vanni and a Chinese guy) and a small "interest" clip on the radio about Nam being banned by her federation because she had an operation. I don't really see things getting any better for a while although some of the top fencers really are improving.

[Fencergrl]

So what have we learned today boys and girls??? Fencing is not a well-known sport anywhere in the world. Yes, some countries have more fencers than others, but overall it doesn't even register on the average people's radar.

The amusing thing is I think a lot of fencers think/thought it was only their country that has this problem.