A Short History of the Sport of Fencing
Fencing carries an unmistakable air of sophistication and tradition — but just how far back does its story really go? The answer surprises most people. In this first installment of our series on the history of fencing, we untangle some of fencing’s long and winding past so you can better appreciate the art behind the blade.
The Earliest Origins of Fencing
Fencing traces its roots to the very dawn of sword-based combat, which emerged in the Late Bronze Age. The oldest known depiction of a fencing competition dates to roughly 1190 BCE, carved into a temple relief in Egypt. Centuries later, the late Roman writer Vegetius described training that favored the thrust over the slash or cut — a principle many historians believe helped shape the French and Italian schools of fencing that flourished in the 1700s.
Swordsmanship was taught in schools across Europe as early as the 12th century, but the first dedicated fencing manuals did not appear until the 1400s. As Europe’s middle classes expanded over the following centuries, more and more men took up the blade as a mark of social standing and military skill. The English word “fencing” itself reflects this defensive purpose: it descends from “defense,” which traces back through Old French to the Latin defendere, meaning “to ward off.”
Early Modern Fencing
The first recognizably modern rules and weapons took shape across the 1700s and 1800s, evolving steadily as the sport gained favor among the aristocracy and upper middle classes. Italian, German, French, and Spanish traditions each refined their own techniques and equipment to suit the style of combat they preferred. Although fencing began as military training and a means of settling disputes through formal duels, it was transformed into a true sport in mid-1700s London by Domenico Angelo, who taught at his renowned School of Arms in Soho.
From there, fencing flourished by emphasizing its positive qualities — physical fitness, graceful movement, balance, and discipline — while shedding its old reputation as preparation for the duel, a stigma it had carried in England for generations. In 1896, men’s fencing was included in the very first modern Olympic Games, and it remains one of the longest-running events still contested today.
Three Weapons, Three Traditions
By the 1900s the sport had settled into three distinct weapons. The foil descends from the training weapon French fencers used in the mid-1700s to practice fast, elegant thrust fencing with the small sword. The épée grew out of the dueling sword: when authorities pressured duelists to fight only until first blood, fencers came to prize light, precise touches, and in épée today the entire body is a valid target and there is no right of way, so whoever lands first scores. The sabre, the cutting weapon, completes the trio. Foil and sabre were on the program of the first modern Olympics in 1896, and épée followed in 1900, when Cuba’s Ramón Fonst won the individual amateur épée title.
Fencing in the Twentieth Century
The modern sport took its shape in the 1900s. After disputes at the 1912 Olympics, the Fédération Internationale d’Escrime (FIE) was founded in 1913 to govern international competition, and it still maintains the rules today. Women made their Olympic debut in the foil event at the 1924 Paris Games; a women’s team event followed in 1960, and women’s épée finally arrived in Atlanta in 1996.
Technology changed the sport just as much. Electrical scoring replaced the eyes of the side judges, reducing bias in judging. It came first to the épée in the 1930s, then to foil in the mid-1950s, and sabre was the last weapon to adopt it, in the late 1980s.
Nadi, Mangiarotti, and d’Oriola: The Foil and Épée Greats
While Hungary ruled sabre, Italy and France shaped foil and épée. Italy’s Nedo Nadi won individual foil at the 1912 Stockholm Games at age 18, and at Antwerp in 1920 he won five gold medals, in individual foil and sabre and in the team foil, épée, and sabre events. He remains the only fencer to win gold in each of the three weapons at a single Olympic Games.
Edoardo Mangiarotti of Italy became the next generation’s greatest champion. Competing in épée and foil between 1936 and 1960, he won 13 Olympic medals, six of them gold, and 39 Olympic and World Championship medals in all, more than any other fencer in history. France’s Christian d’Oriola dominated foil in the same era, winning four Olympic golds (team foil in 1948, individual and team foil in 1952, and individual foil in 1956) and eight world titles in foil between 1947 and 1958.
The Hungarian Century in Sabre
No chapter of fencing history is more striking than Hungary’s domination of sabre, and it began with an Italian. In 1896 the master Italo Santelli moved to Budapest, where he created a “modern style” built on a much quicker defense than classical training called for. Hungarian masters then made the weapon their own. The Hungarian school used finger play to control the blade, allowing a flexible wrist and a minimum of arm movement, and László Borsody, who taught Olympic champions including Pál Kovács, refined a system built on the articulation of the wrist and fingers.
The results were staggering. Hungary won 11 of the 12 Olympic individual sabre titles between 1908 and 1968, including nine straight Games from 1924 to 1964. Aladár Gerevich won seven Olympic golds over six Games between 1932 and 1960, Pál Kovács won six, and Rudolf Kárpáti took the individual title in 1956 and 1960. The Hungarian team won Olympic sabre gold at five successive Games from 1936 to 1960.
Tyshler’s Soviet School Ends the Hungarian Era
The Hungarian grip finally loosened in the 1960s, and the story runs through Moscow. David Tyshler, born in 1927 in Kherson, in today’s Ukraine, and himself an Olympic team sabre bronze medalist in 1956, served as head coach of the Soviet national sabre team from 1961 to 1973. His pupils included Mark Rakita, Viktor Sidyak, and Viktor Krovopuskov, the fencers who would carry Soviet sabre to the top of the podium.
The breakthrough came at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, where the Soviet team of Umyar Mavlikhanov, Mark Rakita, Yakov Rylsky, Boris Melnikov, and Nugzar Asatiani won team sabre gold, with Hungary off the medal podium. Hungary still took the individual title in Tokyo, but in 1968 Poland’s Jerzy Pawłowski broke the nine-Games Hungarian string in a barrage against the Soviet Union’s Mark Rakita. In 1972 in Munich, Viktor Sidyak, a left-handed sabreur known for his aggressive style and “one-and-a-half tempo” attack, became the first Soviet sabreur to win individual Olympic gold. He also won team gold in 1968, 1976, and 1980.
By 1976 the reversal was complete. In Montreal, Krovopuskov won gold, Vladimir Nazlymov took silver, and Sidyak took bronze, a Soviet sweep of the individual sabre podium, and Hungary left without a medal in the event for the first time since 1900. The school that had won half a century of Olympic gold with finger and wrist finesse had been overtaken by a new Soviet generation.
Fencing in America: From Gilded Age Clubs to the Coaching Wave
American fencing began in Gilded Age New York. The Fencers Club, founded in Manhattan in 1883, is the oldest fencing club in the Western Hemisphere; membership once required a listing in the Social Register. In 1891 New York fencers formed the Amateur Fencers League of America, today’s USA Fencing, and in 1894 Harvard, Columbia and Yale held the first intercollegiate championship.
The early years produced real champions. Albertson Van Zo Post won Olympic gold in St. Louis in 1904, George Calnan won épée bronze in 1928, and at the 1932 Los Angeles Games Joseph Levis took foil silver while the US won team bronze in both foil and épée. But the sport lived inside a narrow world of private clubs and Ivy League colleges, and the league at first admitted only white men.
After World War II the balance of power moved to Europe, where the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and their neighbors built fencing into a science of state academies, full-time professional coaches and early talent selection. From the 1964 Olympics through 2000, American fencers won exactly one medal: Peter Westbrook’s sabre bronze at Los Angeles in 1984. Westbrook, the first Black American and the first Asian American to win an Olympic fencing medal, was coached by Csaba Elthes, a Hungarian master who had fled after the 1956 revolution. That first wave of émigrés reshaped American sabre, but it produced isolated stars, not a national system.
By the early 1990s the sport was shrinking. In 1993 American Fencing magazine described a growing crisis in college and high school fencing, as Cornell, Illinois and the US Naval Academy dropped their varsity programs.
Then history intervened. As the Eastern Bloc opened and the Soviet Union dissolved, dozens of elite coaches from Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and other countries settled in the United States, opening clubs and taking over college programs. They brought:
- a training system already proven by decades of Olympic and world titles,
- structured, age-based development starting with young children, and
- the expectation that Americans could beat Europeans.
The results came within a decade, and the first of them arrived, fittingly, in Budapest.
Team USA Wins World Gold in Budapest
The newest chapter of sabre history opened in Hungary itself. At the 2000 World Championships in Budapest, the US women’s sabre team of Nicole Mustilli, Christine Becker, Sada Jacobson, and Mariel Zagunis beat Italy 45–43 in the final to win the world title, the first American team gold at a World Championships in any weapon. The team was led by national women’s sabre coach Ed Korfanty, with personal coaches including Arkady Burdan, Jacobson’s coach, and Vladimir Lilov, Mustilli’s coach. Women’s sabre was not yet an Olympic event; it would debut four years later in Athens.
Fencing in the Twenty-First Century
The new century opened the sport to women in every weapon. Women’s sabre, the last category opened to women, debuted at the 2004 Athens Olympics, where 19-year-old Mariel Zagunis of the United States became the first American to win an Olympic fencing gold medal in 100 years. She defended her title in Beijing in 2008, where American fencers swept all three individual medals. Hungary also returned to the top of the men’s podium, with Áron Szilágyi winning individual sabre gold in 2012 and 2016.
American foil has surged since. In 2018 in Wuxi, China, the US women’s foil team beat Italy 45–35 for the first American senior world title in foil. At Tokyo 2020 Lee Kiefer became the first American to win Olympic individual foil gold, and at Paris 2024 she won again in an all-American final against teammate Lauren Scruggs. The US women’s foil team of Jacqueline Dubrovich, Kiefer, Scruggs, and Maia Weintraub then won team gold, the first American fencing team to win Olympic gold. Épée showed how global the sport has become: Japan’s Koki Kano and Hong Kong’s Vivian Kong won the individual titles in Paris, Hungary took men’s team gold, and Italy won women’s team gold.
Lee Kiefer trained for two decades with Egyptian-born master Amgad Khazbak in Lexington, Kentucky, a sign of how widely American fencing now draws its coaches. The men returned to the podium too: the US men’s sabre team won silver in Beijing in 2008, and at Rio 2016 Alexander Massialas (foil) and Daryl Homer (sabre) won silver, the first individual Olympic medals for US men since 1984. Massialas, coached by his father, former US national team coach Greg Massialas, added a team foil bronze, the first time a US man won two medals at one Games since 1932.
Participation followed the results. USA Fencing had 17,200 members and 497 clubs in 2003 and a record 45,157 members and 752 clubs in the 2024–25 season, and it is targeting 70,000 members before the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. By 2021 New Jersey had become the largest fencing division in the country.
From the temple reliefs of ancient Egypt to the Hungarian masters and the Soviet school, the blade has always been shaped by great coaches handing their craft to the next generation.
