CW |TECHNIQUE
accuracy F
Pinpoint
In Italy and France fencing enjoys the status that rowing enjoys in the UK. Despite its minority sport status, the best British fencers are skilled enough to cross swords with the world’s top talents, as our two top foilists, Richard Kruse and Natalia Sheppard, prove.
encing maintains the Olympic spirit. It is one of only five sports that has been represented at every modern Olympic Games since Athens in 1896, along with athletics, cycling, gymnastics and swimming. There is
no professional circuit in fencing, no big money sponsors or fat pay cheques for the winners. Top fencers simply are devoted to this historic European martial art, the origins of which date back to the late 1400s.
Our two strongest contenders at this year’s Games were Richard Kruse and Natalia Sheppard, our men’s and women’s No 1 respectively, who qualified on merit thanks to their performances during the past 12 months of international competition. Their eight team mates, controversially, made the cut thanks to a ruling that gives the host nation the opportunity to nominate participants. Speaking a couple of weeks before the London Games opened, Kruse said: “Anything less than a podium finish and I won’t be happy.” He fenced for Great Britain in the Athens Olympics of 2004 and at the Beijing Games in 2008, where he made it to the last eight. He has been ranked as high as fifth in the world. If he did end up in the top three of the 64 male fencers competing in the men’s individual foil class, he will have become the first Briton to win an Olympic medal since Henry “Bill” Hoskyns took silver in the men’s épée in Tokyo in 1964. Natalia Sheppard, also, in the jargon of the sport, a foilist, came 13th in the world championships earlier this year. Born Natalia Wieckowska in Poland in 1984, she was a highly successful junior fencer in her home country, but gave up the sport when she came to study at Bath University in her late teens. Now 28, she picked up the foil again only a couple of years ago with the encouragement of her English husband, Gary, who runs a printing supply company. After her remarkable advancement in the past couple of years,
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