TECHNIQUE|CW
Above; Britain’s top men’s foilist Richard Kruse has been ranked as high as fifth in the world, above right; Natalia Sheppard, née Wieckowska, has become British women’s No.1 foilist after taking almost an eight-year break from fencing
is linked to the scoring apparatus but it is grounded so that hits to the floor are not counted.
The bout is conducted in three sessions of three minutes’ duration, with a minute’s rest in between. If the score is tied after the nine minutes of fencing, there is a 1-minute “extra time” period of sudden death. “I generally go to the extra 10th minute,” jokes Sheppard.
Kruse explains the delicate and clever engineering of his kit: “By the time you get to be a top-class fencer, you are a good armourer, so you know how things go together. There are tight standards in the sport and all our equipment is checked before each bout, but we like to choose our own handle or guard. The judges check the strength of the spring in the button to ensure that it will not react to anything under 500 grams of force. The electric current is carried down a wire that sits in a groove on the blade, goes into a socket on the handle and through a wire that we have down our sleeve to the scoring apparatus. “The foils cost about £100 each and last anything from just a few weeks to a couple of months. They are very flexible, so they bend rather than piercing when you make a hit, but they are forged with special alloy called maraging steel so that if they break they snap across the blade and not into a point.” For 10 years Kruse has been sponsored by specialist
manufacturer Leon Paul, which is based in Hendon, close to his north London roots. It provides his fighting uniform: shoes with a very flat sole; white socks; breeches and jacket made of stab-resistant Kevlar; under jacket to give extra protection behind the seams of the over-jacket; electric torso jacket; reinforced glove for the sword hand; and steel mesh mask with a bib to protect the throat. Only the back of the head remains uncovered, so turning your back to an opponent is not allowed. The fighting outfit costs about £1,000.
“Smaller women like me have a lack of reach compared to taller fencers, but we have better coordination, a lower centre of gravity and a smaller target area”
Sheppard has to pay for her own kit, which she reckons costs about £800. “The jacket and breeches should last you several years, but the conductive vest and of course the blades need replacing regularly.” As a 10-year-old back in Poland, Sheppard attended a
fencing club with her parents and her two sisters. “It was something we could do together as a family. Many towns and cities in Poland have a good fencing club. While it is nothing like as popular here in the UK, I have noticed that British clubs attract a wide variety of people from all sorts of walks of life and professions,” she says.
She does not belong to a UK club, preferring to work with her coach, Maciej Wojtkowiak, yet another Pole on the British fencing training squad. Her devotion to her re-adopted sport is admirable. Her day job is as a legal and human resources manager. Interviewed for this feature barely two weeks before her Olympic debut, she was going into the office on Saturday and Sunday to catch up with the work her intensive training had left undone.
Until four years ago Kruse, who has an engineering degree, was working part-time in an engineering company, but he gave it up to concentrate full-time on fencing. He is given a small grant by the sporting authorities and has a supportive girlfriend, but otherwise, like Natalia Sheppard, he is as near to the Olympian ideal of the dedicated amateur as you are likely to find these days.
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