Houston Sword Sports watched the Olympics!

The Olympic fencing events have ended (except Pentathlon, but I don’t know any of those people). It was a great games to watch, and we’re really proud of the American fencers who brought home two silvers and two bronzes. Since many of the events happened during the day, we had to find creative ways to watch the games and still go about our normal duties.

We wanted to watch two of the men’s epee bouts at the same time, had to find creative ways of propping up the phones.

We got to show the fencers in our Bellaire fencing camp some really amazing final bouts, to give them a taste for how fencing can look when it’s being done by someone with more than a few days’ experience.

We were so caught up in the bouts we showed the kids that we forgot to take any pictures of the group watching the Olympic fencing. It basically looked like this picture, where Dan is showing the kids the pool sheet from their end-of-camp tournament.

Coach Liz’s favorite moments of the games, in no particular order:

• Men’s Epee: Max Heinzer of Switzerland, who I was totally rooting for initially, running off the back of the strip for no apparent reason as soon as his quarterfinal started. I started rooting for his opponent instead, Park Sangyoung of Korea…
• and that proved a good bet since he had that amazing comeback in the final to win the gold medal.
• Men’s Epee part 2: In the bronze, one of the guys did this amazing move where he beat six (upwards and outwards) and then hit the other guy’s foot, because the other guy was stuck in a lunge. I have been trying to replicate this in practice, but since I can’t get that low and my opponents don’t generally lunge that deeply, it has not looked nearly as cool.
• Men’s Foil: Enzo Lefort losing his phone on strip.
• Men’s Saber: Daryl Homer’s semifinal. The whole thing.
• Women’s Foil: The final bout was so close, it was heartbreaking to have it end by running out of time.
• Women’s Saber (Team): The commentators ran out of things to say about the match because Team USA was winning by so much, so they started talking about opera instead. Actually, this was not a favorite. It was just really weird. I enjoyed the rest of the bout though.
• Women’s epee: Sadly, since I am a woman epee fencer, I did not actually get to watch any of the women’s epee.

Coach Dan’s favorite moments of the games, in no particular order:

• Men’s Foil: Alex Massialas’s rally against Giorgio Avola in the men’s foil quarterfinal.
• Men’s Saber: Pancho Pascov of Bulgaria (302^nd ranked men’s saber fencer in the world) upsetting the world #2 Alexey Yakimenko. Shoulda dropped your saber, Yaki.
• Men’s foil team and women’s saber team both dominating Italy to win bronze.
• Men’s Foil Team: France putting in their sub to get him a gold medal and ending up losing to Russia (I felt bad for them).
• Watching epeeists do footwork.
• MAX!!!

One of our members said her takeaway from the Olympics was “I guess I do need to move more.”

So what about you? What were your favorite moments? What are you trying in practice now?

P.S. If anybody has a video or GIF of Heinzer’s boneheaded move please email it to us!