44. Team Foil Fencing

Event: Women's Team Foil
Date: 28th February 2014
Location: Colchester and District Fencing Club, Gilberd School, Colchester
Cost: £25 for one month membership
Rules: Teams of three fencers compete against opponents over a series of nine three-minute bouts, with the aim of accumulating a maximum of 45 hits to win the match. Hits are recorded electronically, and are scored by hitting the opponent with the tip of the weapon. Foil is a light weapon derived from the court sword, and foil fencing has strict right-of-way and timing rules. The torso is the target area.  

   

The Event: 

Ellie vs Alex

Noah vs Sarah

Aaron vs Neil

Teams:

Team Sarah: Sarah, Aaron, Alex.

Team Ellie: Ellie, Neil, Noah.

Scores:

Team Sarah: 35 v 45 Team Ellie

 

London 2012 Winner: Italy.  

 

Comments:  

Sarah: This was our first time actually wearing the foil jackets and introduction to the right-of-way scoring system, which I just couldn't understand! I'm sure you're meant to play far more tactically that I did, but I resorted to just going for the hit regardless of if it was my right of way or not!  Once again, we had to be flexible with the rules in the team event and had mixed teams, and we're super thankful to the gents for helping us out! We were relieved to have the others there to referee the matches, as it would have been chaos if we'd blindly tried to award points to the fencer with the correct riposte or right of way!  

Ellie: Word of our challenge has spread through our fencing group and people were very keen to take part in this, our last team event. Noah and Alex, both being infinitely more experienced than us, took complete charge with scoring, judging and competing coming effortlessly to them both. It was incredible to watch these matches alongside them (and Alan) and to see how much more they are able to see compared to me. They could easily tell who had right of way and what each fencer was trying to do - it was remarkable as it all happens so fast! We spread this team event over two weeks after some technical issues slowed us down; this gave us a great cliffhanger effect! 
Once again, it was a real learning opportunity to fight against people with such skill and to see how quickly they can get the measure of their opponent. My strategy was to get the tougher matches over as quickly as possible and to get at least a couple of points from them if I could - easier strategised (is that a word?), than done!

Big thanks to everyone who helped us with this one, especially Aaron, Alex, Neil and Noah for fighting and Alan helping to ref!