Foil Fencing E-Book

John Routledge

• Herausgeber: The Crowood Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 191

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Fencing is a sport that demands exceptional speed, agility and timing. As the lightest of the three weapons, the foil additionally requires precise technique and intelligent strategies – something that only comes with practice. Combining the author's advanced knowledge of foil fencing and background in visual communication, this practical book offers key exercises for developing technique, providing a comprehensive insight into the skills and strategies needed to become a competitive fencer. Key topics covered include: the best moments to initiate an attack; how to understand distance and timing and a look at the best practices employed by top international fencers. Shows footwork exercises along with illustrated examples and features over 120 stunning photos and precise, detailed diagrams.

Leseprobe

Using Prime at close quarters.

First published in 2022 by The Crowood Press Ltd Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

This e-book first published in 2022

© John Routledge 2022

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7198 4109 5

Cover design by Sergey Tsvetkov

Dedication For my son Charlie. I hope you find this book useful some day.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

1 DISTANCE AND TIMING

2 SIMPLE AND COMPOUND ACTIONS

3 FOOTWORK

4 PERFORMANCE ON THE DAY OF COMPETITION

5 RECONNAISSANCE

6 DEFENCE

7 DRILLS WITH A PARTNER

8 COMMON TECHNICAL MISTAKES

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the following masters, mentors and coaches who gave me their time and shaped the way I think about fencing. Their knowledge permeates this book. I would like to thank Petru Kuki, Dmitri Chevtchenko, Professor Alec Movshovich, Professor Brian Pitman, Professor Norman Golding, Gordon Daniels, Allen Cooke, Chris Galesloot, Dr Jonathan Katz, Adam Blight, Maciej Pulaczewski, Donnie McKenzie, Ian Lichfield, Patsy Hunt and Steve Davey.

Unquestionably, the biggest influence on my coaching has been grande maestro Ziemek Wojciechowski. His tutelage, over the course of the last six years, has completely transformed my understanding of fencing.

Thank you to Niki Bruckner, David Bradley and Beth Davidson for consenting to have their excellent photography featured, and to Crowood for their amazing help with all things editorial. I am grateful to Katherine Kwa, Carl Smeaton and Charlie Routledge for so beautifully performing the demonstrations upon which my illustrations were based. Finally, I would like to thank my family without whose help and encouragement this book would not have been possible.

FOREWORD

I have known John Routledge for more years than I would care to count since the time I was one of his schoolteachers. He started fencing aged eight, and in his youth he went on to win the Hampshire Youth Championships, the Southern Region Championships and a handful of medals at the Leon Paul Junior Series. He took individual lessons from the coaching legend Professor Brian Pitman who had been the National Coach in all three weapons and was President of the British Academy of Fencing. Over the next five years, John worked his way up to being the highest ranked senior foilist in the southern region. Changing his focus from personal fencing achievements to coaching, John spent two years as the Southern Regions Head Foil Coach, leading the coaching on their Regional Hub training days. From 2017 to 2019, he worked as a Talent Coach for British Fencing as part of the team delivering the Athlete Development Programme. This included coaching at many Talent and AASE training camps.

He is now, having been a full-time professional fencing coach for fifteen years, a Level Five England foil coach and FIE qualified Maître d’Escrime, having studied in Bucharest, Romania, under three times Olympian Petru Kuki, Professor Alek Movshovich from the Moscow Academy of Sport and the 1995 world foil champion Dmitri Chevtchenko. His final examination was chaired by the FIE’s technical director Ioan Pop. For the past six years, he has been undertaking Continuing Professional Development with Great Britain’s Olympic fencing coach Ziemek Wojciechowski.

John possesses the most important attributes of any first-rate teacher: knowledge of, and passion for, his subject and care and consideration for his students, as well as the bonus (or perhaps necessity?) of a good sense of humour. His approach to coaching is athlete centred. John says that he never found learning easy and has had to think about every aspect of fencing, and that again is a mark of a great coach; a person who can understand the difficulties learners will experience as they develop their skills. His ethos is to aid the empowerment and development of young people through sport. John’s methods work. His fencers have won numerous County and Regional Championships and he has coached winners at both the British Youth Championships and the Public Schools Fencing Championship. He recently coached the England Under-17 and Under-20 foil teams at the Cadet and Junior Commonwealth Fencing Championships in Newcastle, working as part of the amazing team that won the India Trophy for Most Successful Nation of the Championships. This book is the fruit of his experience as a fencing coach and his skill in visual communication. Any fencer or coach wanting to elevate their game will learn much from it.

Maciej Pulaczewski MRHistS, FRSA, Researcher, Arms and Armour Research Group, University of Huddersfield and British Fencing Coach

Ziemowit Wojciechowski and John Routledge at the Leon Paul Fencing Centre in London.

INTRODUCTION

The samurai Miyamoto Musashi was known as one of Japan’s greatest swordsmen. He was reported to have survived sixty duels, the first of which, he fought when he was just thirteen years old. Anyone who has read about the life of Musashi will be drawn to the conclusion that he didn’t feel that a single lifetime was long enough to fully master swordsmanship. This is one of the things I love about fencing. There is always something new to learn. Fencers and coaches should be on a path of continuous development. The second you think that you know it all … that is a dangerous moment. I primarily see myself as a student of fencing and hope to never stop learning.

Having collected an extensive library of fencing books over the years, I was often left frustrated as I had to use my imagination to try and piece together exactly what the author was trying to express. Although I treasured these books, it was clear that when describing a fencing lesson or the interplay between two fencers, words alone are not enough. ‘How exactly should the blades be presented?’, ‘What distance should the fencers be at?’. These details are crucial and cannot be adequately conveyed by text alone.

Having been incredibly fortunate to have been given the opportunity to work with several world class coaches, I wanted to use my background in illustration and visual communication to represent what I have learned about fencing. My hope is that I have created a beautiful book that captures my love for the sport. I have tried extremely hard to give the diagrams clarity so that nothing important is lost in the depiction.

I hope it helps you on your fencing journey.

1

DISTANCE AND TIMING

Fencers should methodically work to improve their feeling for distance. Experienced fencers build up a sixth sense for this. At any moment they can instinctively feel, for example, if they would need to use an extension, a lunge or an even longer attack to reach out and hit their opponent. Novice fencers lack this sense and will often fall unintentionally short in their attacks or will hit with hard lunges when their opponent could be easily reached simply by extending their arm.

En garde!

CONTROL THE DISTANCE, CONTROL THE BOUT

If you can build up a keen sense for distance, you can begin to develop your ability to control the space between yourself and your opponent. By being in control of the distance, you take control of the match. Your opponent continually chases after you. They feel perpetually one step behind, yet they are still compelled to try and keep up. They never seem to find themselves at quite the right distance to initiate a successful attack. Becoming impatient, they find themselves launching desperate attacks at inopportune moments.

Exploit poor distance

By preying on their opponent’s poor sense of distance, a defender is often able to outmanoeuvre their partner whilst waiting patiently for the final attack. When this anticipated attack finally comes, the prepared defender can calmly take a big step backwards with a well-timed parry. This leaves their over-stretched adversary stranded and at the mercy of a fast riposte. Alternatively, the defender, by being in control of the distance, can simply step away from any incoming attacks. Their high level of mobility easily allows them to make their opponent’s attack fall short. We call this ‘defending with distance’. If the attacker has stretched out fully in trying to hit, they will likely be unable to recover quickly and become vulnerable to an answering attack from their opponent.

Controlling the distance is like having possession in football

Surrendering control of the distance quickly becomes exhausting. In football, when one team uses precision passing to keep possession (the Spanish call this style of play ‘tiki-taka’), their opposition soon becomes sapped of energy from running around after the ball. Pursuing the elusive ball in this fashion can begin to feel like chasing ghosts. In much the same way, if you take control of the distance, your opponent will waste their energy. They will tend to rush around inefficiently, just trying to stay with you. If you can become this elusive to catch, your opponents will quickly tire and will likely fade in the later stages of the match.

Change the distance

Coaches, as well as fencers, should remind themselves to focus on distance and timing in training. Surprisingly, this pivotal aspect of fencing is sometimes overlooked. For example, it is common to see even highly skilled coaches give individual lessons where the distance between the participants doesn’t change throughout. Here, the fencer surrenders the initiative and is expected to simply follow the coach, keeping at a consistent distance throughout the lesson. Coaches should actively avoid imposing such unrealistic fixed distances as this approach limits the effectiveness of their lessons.

The importance of timing

However, with experience a coach will gradually develop a greater feeling and control of the distance. Now the lesson can better resemble a bout, where the distance between the competitors constantly fluctuates. This more accurately represents the ever-changing distance between two fencers in a real competitive match. The coach no longer feels it necessary to always take the lead. Occasionally, they now allow the initiative to pass freely from the coach to the fencer and back again. Practising this way enables the fencer to learn how best to exploit the changes in distance and to discover the optimal moments to attack. For this reason, not only distance but also timing becomes a crucial factor in determining the best moment to start and finish your attacks. It is important for the coach to realize that every exercise has a correct distance. As their student becomes more experienced, the fencer should become more active and involved in deciding how far away from their coach they are. If, on the other hand, the coach is always setting up the distance for them the pupil is reduced to a passive role. In this instance, they will not learn to understand distance and timing so profoundly.

IN SUMMARY

•Always be mindful of distance and timing in training.

•Fencers and coaches will improve their sense of distance with experience.

•Coaches should avoid giving lessons where the fencer is passive and following them at a fixed distance.

•In lessons, the coach shouldn’t always have the initiative; instead it should pass from coach to fencer and back again.

•Every exercise has a correct distance.

•Advanced fencers should take an active role in setting the distance in their lessons.

•An individual lesson, in which the distance regularly changes, is an ideal learning environment for fencers to discover the best distances and moments to initiate their attacks.

Find the best moments to attack

As a fencer gains experience, their timing will sharpen. They will come to realize that not all moments to attack are equal. They find that they can now exploit their newly acquired sense of timing to seize moments where their opponent is particularly vulnerable. Remember, the more familiar you become with these moments, the quicker you will recognize them. With experience, you will cultivate an instant awareness of these favourable situations when they arise during your competitive matches. Only by consciously developing your familiarity to these moments can you capitalize on the precise timing that they require.

Controlling the distance in defence.

Improve your preparation by focussing on footwork

Fundamental to gaining the ability to control the distance, the fencer must develop their footwork. For example, as the distance between attacker and opponent gets shorter, the advancing fencer’s steps need to become smaller. This is necessary, as employing long steps would allow their opponent to anticipate when they are going to initiate their final attack. Giving an opponent this knowledge would leave the attacker particularly vulnerable to attacks on their preparation. However, if a fencer makes a concerted effort to improve their footwork, they will eventually develop the habit of making smaller, more controlled steps as soon as the distance shortens. Now, without even having to think about it, they will automatically move with light, controlled footwork that doesn’t betray their intentions. This effectively camouflages the moment that they will initiate their attack. Creating this new habit to take smaller steps yields the additional benefit of enabling them to make quick changes of direction, further improving their ability to control the distance.

Too close when attacking

Most fencers get too close in their preparation as they press forward trying to set up their attack. This is a sign of their aggressive inclination to chase their opponent and get the hit. Unfortunately, coming too close whilst advancing yields several benefits to their opponent. Firstly, it increases their opportunities to find the blade (leaving them vulnerable to the defender’s parry riposte) whilst also making them more susceptible to their opponent’s counter-attacks. For this reason, if you are a coach, it is important that during your individual lessons you take small steps backwards. The coach taking small steps whilst retreating tends to compel their students to do the same. If, despite these efforts, you find the distance collapsing as the student presses too closely, you cannot allow the lesson to continue until the fencer has been made aware of their mistake. There are small margins for error in high level fencing and small but important details like this can end up proving decisive.

Finding a good distance for the riposte.

Too far away when defending

Conversely, fencers sometimes put far too much distance between themselves and their opponent as they retreat in defence. Here, fencers should ignore their intuition. In this situation, a fencer’s first thought will be to get as far away from their opponent as possible. It seems logical that increasing the distance in defence would make them safer. However, the perceived safety they get in taking this approach is largely an illusion. With no pressure on their build up, the attacking fencer can easily push them to the back line before finishing once they have them where they want them. Instead, it is preferable to defend closer and to put pressure on the attacker’s advance. The overriding principle is that you must not allow your advancing opponent to feel comfortable at any time. If you are successful in agitating your pressing adversary in this way, then you are probably at an ideal distance for defence.

Hindering

Whilst retreating in defence, the fencer can combine this closer distance with extending their arm slightly. This will have the effect of further hindering the attacker. Such a provocation will disconcert the advancing fencer, giving them the feeling that they are too close for comfort. Now, the attacking fencer cannot relax for a second and is continually worrying whether they will be counter-attacked. They may find it impossible to press forward continuously and might even stop. If the pressing fencer’s attack does break down, the defending fencer can now seize the initiative by taking over and pressing forward instead.

Active defence

One excellent method, which helps to avoid defending at too long a distance, is to retreat with an ‘active defence’ (continually moving in and out of the distance) threatening the advancing fencer with feints of counter-attack. This approach requires excellent footwork and is extremely physically demanding. However, if the defending fencer can work their footwork this hard they can remain in control, dominating the distance, even as they retreat. This poses a far greater challenge to an advancing fencer than a defender who, instead, simply retreats lazily at a slow and constant pace.

Use the element of surprise

In setting up your attack, use the element of surprise. The more skilled the fencer is in exploiting the element of surprise, the less their opponent will be able to anticipate the timing, speed and type of the action being used against them. To maximize your chances of success, seek to combine this with the ability to consistently attack from the most inconvenient distance for your opponent in any given situation.

The Critical Distance

One key idea to understand when trying to conceptualize distance and timing is ‘the critical distance’. This refers to the distance at which your opponent will almost certainly react (usually by either searching for the blade, or by counter-attacking). The likelihood that you will draw this reaction from your opponent is to be expected because you are now close enough to hit them with a single tempo action. If you have set things up properly, you will also have priority at this moment. Foil fencing currently favours the attacking fencer. However, this is only true if they can create the right moment to initiate their attack. If you find yourself at ‘the critical distance’ and you have priority, you should certainly pull the trigger on your attack as the odds of success will be stacked in your favour. Once this course of action has been decided upon, you must avoid being hesitant. Having chosen the right moment to go, you must believe in your action, finishing fast and committed. The struggle for impunity whilst entering ‘critical distance’ against an opponent who is actively trying to prevent you from doing this, is in many ways the basis for foil fencing’s tactics. One solution to this problem is, as previously discussed, to develop the ability of the fencer to act unexpectedly and surprise their opponent.

Space Invaders

Russian coaches think about distance using a concept they call ‘tochka’. This refers to a change of distance employed by your opponent during your attack or just before you intend to hit. Hitting a static target is easy. However, hitting a moving target requires that you track and then anticipate the path of your target’s future movements. To develop this skill, the attacker is tasked with anticipating where their opponent will be (in terms of distance) at the end of their attack. For example, the attacker begins their final action but must anticipate whether their opponent will retreat, stay still or step forward at the last moment. This is like the video game Space Invaders. In this 1978 arcade game, the alien invaders constantly move across the screen. If the player shoots where an invader currently is, the shot will fall behind and miss as the alien continues to move forwards. Instead, good players anticipate the movement of their target and shoot ahead, aiming at where the alien invader is going to be. The concept of ‘tochka’ also encompasses anticipating which sector of your opponent’s target will be open when you finish your attack. For example, predicting that the opponent will use body evasion by turning to try to make you miss. In this instance, the attacker must be able to anticipate their opponent’s evasive action and finish to flank.

Expect danger whilst preparing

The conventions of fencing dictate that fencers start each new point of a bout, spaced four metres apart. Should they attempt to initiate an attack from this long distance without any preparatory manoeuvring to set up their attack, they are almost certain to fail. However, whilst manoeuvring to prepare their attack, the advancing fencer should expect to be beset by many threats concocted by their defending opponent. Despite the wide range of defensive actions that will likely be used to harass the attacker (attacks in preparation at the beginning of their step into lunge distance, answering attacks after their attack is made to fall short, ripostes after they have been parried, etc.), the goal of the attacker is to find the critical distance whilst maintaining priority.

Commit to your final action.

THE FOUR BEST MOMENTS TO ATTACK

It is helpful to realize that there are four common situations that happen frequently in every fencing match. Experienced fencers recognize these situations when they inevitably occur. They should aim to exploit them, by launching their attacks at the exact timing that these moments require thereby stacking the odds of scoring heavily in their favour. Foil fencing is about taking risks, but we need them to be calculated risks. Too many fencers get impatient and, without setting up the correct moment, attack recklessly anyway. This is a gift to their opponent. Listed below are the four best moments to attack in order of effectiveness, starting with what is widely considered the best moment to attack – at the beginning of your opponent’s preparatory step forward into your lunging distance.

Using the four best moments in training

Each of these four moments should be practised regularly with drills that improve the fencer’s understanding and feeling for the situation. The fencer must become so used to each moment that they are able to instantly recognize when it occurs in their matches. To be clear, the fencer can only seize upon one of these four moments and exploit the advantage they offer if they can spot the situation instantaneously, precisely catching the ideal moment to attack. This requires that the fencer, through habitual training and the use of specific drills, becomes extremely familiar with each situation. To allow this process to take place, the coach can use these four moments as a helpful framework. This allows them to place any action that they wish to introduce or develop with the fencer into the context of the situations described below.

Attack in preparation

Both fencers are positioned just outside of their lunging distance. Your opponent tries to prepare their attack by maneuvering closer with a single step. At the very beginning of this movement, you launch your own attack. You must aim to land the hit before your opponent’s front foot has touched the ground. That way, your opponent’s forward momentum is carrying them straight into your attack. This is a key realization that your opponent needs to get to their lunging distance in order to launch their attack.