The words of the FIE's president

[Stryder]

"Take notice, that there should be some changes made in the very duels. They ought to be made more dynamic and the time of the team fights ought to be shortened from to three minutes. The foil ought to be modified to become classical and more understandable for the public. It seems to me that judging needs an improvement too, but sadly we only have talked about it for fifty years."

Ignore for a moment that the translation sounds like something from a Police Academy movie. Do any of you think he means this? Even he admits that the same tune has been sung for too many years to give it any credence.

Do fencers really feel that our sport will be more publicly accepted if we slow down?!!
Fencing is great because it is fast! If you can watch Nascar, and golf on the same channel, then how can speed be such a factor?

ESPN shows nine-ball tournaments for hours at a time. Why? Because people play nine-ball. Not because it's fast, but because people like to see the experts playing the game they play.

Will fencing ever catch on in the US or anywhere? Maybe not. But messing up the game will not help. (I actually liked the idea of making team matches shorter. 37 minutes of epee is too long.)

That is my opinion. What's yours?

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www.geocities.com/strydermike

[oiuyt]

Another thing in favor of 9 ball being televised is that you can SEE what's happening... okay, maybe you can't see the spin etc., but the commentators can (and do) tell you exactly what the player's about to do (similar to the way golf commentators can the breaks on the greens for those who have seen golf but not 9-ball) and then you can watch the player hit it exactly the way the commentator just called it, all slow enough that someone who's never played can follow exactly what just happened. The first time I watched 9-ball on television I'd never played it, learned the rules from the commentators, and had only VERY rarely even played any type of pool before, yet I could follow everything and enjoy the tournament. Same thing the first televised billiards event I watched (I've STILL never played billiards). Now try taking someone who's never seen fencing before and giving them the same experience.... it's a LOT harder.

-B

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"Oh but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!"

All your music are belongs to us- RIAA

[DarkTransient]

Translation:
"We have talked about making fencing a better sport for the past 50 years, and we will talk about it for 50 more. For all of you suckas, just keep on paying your memebership fees so I can keep going to the bank. And I will make sure that when everthing else in this world has gone wireless, fencing won't."

[DarkTransient]

p.s.
Golf is NOT a sport!!!

[Ron Antrim]

How do we make fencing palatable and exciting to the public?
How about any or all of these ideas....
1.) go wireless with a radio pack for scoring
2.) mike the fencers for sound.
3.) slo-motion camera work, with multi camera angles to better show the action of a conversation and score.
4.) color commentary from former olympic fencers, to enhance the action
5.) fencer profiles and post match interviews, Lets put faces and feelings into the televised bouts.
ESPN uses a simular formula when it does ametuer boxing and NCAA baseball,tennis etc.
Not such a stretch when you think about it.

[ladybug]

Ron -

Mike the FENCERS for sound?? I don't know about that!! I have a reputatioin to uphold and I certainly wouldn't want the comments I was mumbling (about myself, of course) during the last tournament broadcast to others. I definatly think that it would help if the directors were wired for sound tho.

[Ron Antrim]

Ladybug,
Well, miking the fencers would definetly add
to to color of the bouts. Remember broadcasts
can be edited for content and if all else fails they could always beep out the expletives.
Ron

[DarkTransient]

Go wireless and make epee a team sport. e.g. like soccer, 11 vs 11, whomever gets touched by any memeber of the opposing team gets removed from the field, and a team wins a point by removing the goalie of the opposing team.

[Stryder]

I agree with the wireless idea. The most common annoying question I get from people I thought were intelligent is "What are the ropes for?"

We did the 'interviews and player bios' at our last tournament, and no one was interested. They did it at JO's too, in the finals they had projectors on each end of the room with the score, a picture of the fencer, and his/her biographical information.

Again, no one seemed to care.


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www.geocities.com/strydermike

[space_cadet]

Fencing really isn't a spectator-friendly sport. In top-level fencing, sometimes you can't see the tip hit the target because it all happens so quickly and the blade is not easy to see from a distance. In all other sports, most everything involved is easily visible, e.g. golf balls, clubs, and hole; pool table, balls and cue; car.

Have you ever watched a sport where you didn't know what was going on, what the rules were and why one team was winning or was better? After awhile, it gets boring to watch.

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Cadet à Space

[Tim McMackin]

I can't offer any advice on how to make the sport more popular or spectator-friendly; I can't even tell if it's impossible or not.

What I wanted to ask was what was meant by making it "more dynamic." Making the foil "more classical" may well mean "less flickable," but as I see it, the flick is one of the more dynamic parts of the sport, because it forces me to defend against an attack from the sides or the top, rather than the standard straight or point-first attack. But it is also possible that he thinks this kind of attack is being relied on too much and we need to find new and creative ways to get the drop on our opponents.

(Plus, flicks are too #$%$@ frustrating to deal with. Oops, was that out loud?)

Any thoughts?

Tim

[Tomas N]

Space C,

Do you really think the rules in fencing are more complicated than the rules in, let's say, football? I don't think it's the complexity of the rules that makes fencing an uninteresting spectator sport. I agree with you completely that it's the speed and the strategy. I don't think there's another sport that's as fast or where there's so much strategic activity (that is so difficult to understand unless you're in the mask/head of one of fencers). Maybe we need helmet cams.

Tomas

[Boo Boo]

You really couldn't attach a mike to some fencers: it would probably burst a few sound technicians' ear drums when they yell.

[latenight]

How 'bout we make the foil tips glow like fox did the puck in hockey. It could glow yellow and turn red when a touch was scored

[vegan]

Space C,
I just watched about 2 hours of australian rules football (what a weird game that is!!) and I understood none of it. It is a fast and interesting sport to watch, just on the pure athleticism scale, they fake, run, jump, kick, tackle, steal, intercept and finally run some more. Cool game that is enjoyable to watch- perhaps with the right spin, our sport would be fun to watch also- It certainly has athleticism, and strategy . . .
just my 2 cents
B.

[space_cadet]

To vegan,
Interestingly enough, it was Australian rugby that I was watching that bored me. I didn't know the rules and it seemed to be a free-for-all "American-football"/"team handball"/"it kind of is like normal rugby sometimes"/"do as you please" game.

To Tomas N,
Not so much the rules but the actual bladework. At top-level fencing, the fencers keep their blade actions small and tight and quick. To the average person, it looks like a lottery for who gets the point unless it's a one-lighter, or it's as if the person scored by magic because the touch happened so quickly.

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Cadet à Space

[Zelda]

vegan, I have liked in Australia all my life and still dont get australian rules football. thats 23 years of absolute confusion in my case!

[edew]

Stryder/Ron:

Wireless or not is not the big issue for spectators. If anything, it provides something unique and interesting for spectators. And so they'll ask. After one answer, they'll understand.

Why mike the fencers for sound when none of them are even allowed to speak, and when they do, it's usually some expletive or some grunts which could easily be heard without having to mike the fencers individually.

Slo-mo camera. Yes.

Former olympians as color commentators. I think if we look at the history of commentators in the NFL and the MLB, both of which have a rich history of doing that, we see that some former players are good at it, and some are not. Being a former olympian doesn't make you a good commentator. Being a good commentator is better than being an olympian.

Fencer profiles and post match interviews will be useful for non-fencing spectators. Spectators at the JOs were almost all fencers or coaches or parents. They of course don't need to know nor care about the fencer profiles. But on TV, they can splice that information in between bouts and that would make it worthwhile.

And Mr Space_Cadet: how can you say golf balls are easily visible? On TV? I was in Reno this weekend, and after the event, I went over to the driving range and watched the golfers pop some shots into the man-made lake. If you are not directly behind the golfer, you can pretty much say good-bye to seeing the ball in flight. And even if you're standing behind the golfer, it's still pretty hard to see the ball. The only guess of where the ball is is when it splashed down in the lake.

Lastly, can we just kill the flick issue? The flick is rarely employed in the top level fencing. At the Reno NAC, none of the top-4 fencers used flicks other than when necessary. Jed Dupree relied on a very plain parry four STRAIGHT riposte. Maged Shaker from Egypt never flicked throughout his bouts. Just distance, simple attacks and counter-attacks while running away.

Kahleed from Canada of course can flick, but he did maybe one or two flicks against Jed in the gold medal bout, and maybe just as many against Maged in the semi-finals.

Flicks are used primarily by the second tier fencers to blow away the third-tier fencers. Once you get to the top-tier, the flick attacks drop significantly.

[Peach]

Boy, was Jed Dupree's fencing fun to watch. Clean, correct, and speaking purely from a disinterested female middle-aged professional person's point of view, he's cuuuuute.

[d8m2k]

Originally posted by edew:

Lastly, can we just kill the flick issue? The flick is rarely employed in the top level fencing. At the Reno NAC, none of the top-4 fencers used flicks other than when necessary. Jed Dupree relied on a very plain parry four STRAIGHT riposte. Maged Shaker from Egypt never flicked throughout his bouts. Just distance, simple attacks and counter-attacks while running away.


Flicks are used primarily by the second tier fencers to blow away the third-tier fencers. Once you get to the top-tier, the flick attacks drop significantly.[/B]

That's funny, watching the Olympic foil events, I got a different impression. In fact in an interview I read, Kim (KOR) said his favorite action was the flick. This is not to say that flicks were all important, but you can't discount them, nor say only second tier fencer's use them. The use of the flick has declined slightlybut that is because they were so effective and overused. Athletes have discovered equally effective ways to counter them. In addition, the Euros are always training towards the next interpretation of the rules. Example: The French trained for years in sabre, without fleching before the rule change. The result was astounding once the rule did change.