Today, August 28th, at 8:00 pm, the dances will open 2024 Paralympics in Paris. The ceremony will open with an athletes’ parade on the Champs-Elysées – the beating heart of the French capital – where 184 delegations from all over the world will parade. There is not much time left and we will go back to dreaming for 12 days full of events (549 to be precise) with over 4,400 athletes as protagonists. Among the many sports that we will see there will also be fencingan Olympic discipline in which Italy has always stood out. Perhaps already by observing the matches of the recent Olympics you will have noticed a curious detail: a cable attached to each fencer’s uniform. But what is it exactly? A sort of rope to pull them back in case they advance too far or risk falling off the stage? No, that’s not possible: those who know fencing know that advancing towards the opponent is the point of the game, and that fencers certainly don’t run the risk of falling from who knows what height. The answer is another: the metal wire in fencing is used to count the scores precisely. Inside this cable, an electric current flows, which records all the movements of the players.
What is the purpose of the cable in fencing and how does it work?
Fencing is a sport in which needle-like blades are used and very fast blows. For these very reasons it is very difficult to keep track of the points, and we had to find a way to invent the electric score which has come down to the present day, with the necessary adjustments. This form of counting is now part of fencing for almost a centuryas the electric epee made its debut in the 1930s. About twenty years later, the electric epee was also introduced for foil, and in the late 1980s, sabre also became electric.
But how does it work in practice? Every fencer in competition must pass the body cord (the cable) through his jacket, and then down through his sleeve into his sword arm (or foil or sabre) to hook it up to it. And that’s how the electric current that flows inside the cable records every single touch of the two challengers.
In the sword fencingthe target area is the entire body (all of it, from head to toe), so it is not necessary to distinguish where the touch occurs, but in foil fencing – where the target area is only the torso – and in the sabre fencing – where the target area extends from the hips to the head – things change. In these last two cases, fencers must make an extra connection pass, hooking the cable to a electrically conductive jacket called “lamé”. These fencers also have a cable that connects their lamé to the electric mask.
When fencing became a Paralympic discipline
Paralympic fencing (both foil, epee and sabre) is a static discipline where fencers compete on a wheelchair tied to a special frame firmly fixed to the floor. The fencers can therefore not move forward or backward, and are always in close contact with the opponent, making the matches very intense. In this case too, the cable passes inside the jacket and sleeve and is attached to the epee, foil or sabre.
It was the neurologist Sir Ludwig Guttman at Stoke Mandeville Hospital who had the brilliant idea: to use fencing for rehabilitation. After the Second World War he had treated many patients with spinal cord injuries, and being a keen fencing enthusiast he thought the sport would help their recovery by strengthening their muscles and improving their balance.
Paralympic fencing became increasingly popular during the 1950s, and the discipline was included in the inaugural Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960. The fencers who participate all have a disability that affects motor function: orthopedic dysfunctions, paraplegia, quadriplegia, hemiplegia, cerebral palsy, degenerative neurological disorders and neurological disabilities.
