Bill Bryson's Games: Why not have blindfold fencing?

By BILL BRYSON

I went to the fencing competitions the other day.

A lot of people don't like fencing because they don't understand the rules and terminology, but in fact it's quite simple.

There are basically four thrusts, known as the cartilage, the chaise longue, the aubergine and the fromage anglaise, and these in turn can be parried by four defensive feints the pastiche, the penchant, the demitasse, and the salmon en croute.

Scoring is on the basis of one point for a petite pois and two for a baguette. Points equally can be deducted for a foot fault, or pied a terre, and for a type of illegal lunge known as a zut alors.

Actually, I don't have the faintest notion what goes on in fencing, but that's okay because this is the Olympics and it's full of sports that most people don't understand or closely follow.

It's part of the glory of the enterprise, if you ask me. There is something here for everyone. I thought I would spend a couple of days looking at some of the more marginally popular competitions.

It has long been a mystery to me why some sports in the world are immensely popular and others are not. As far as I can see, there is no inherent reason why audiences should particularly enjoy watching people trying to kick a ball into a net or throw it through a hoop compared with, say, watching other people trying to poke each other with sharp sticks, yet indubitably they do. My idea was to try to find out why.

And so I was to be found with 1200 or so other journalists and spectators at the fencing arena earlier this week.

It has to be said that fencing, at least for the inexperienced observer, is an oddly brief and confusing exercise. At a signal from the referee, the opponents lunge forward, go tick, tick, tick with their weapons for literally about two seconds, and then a light comes on announcing a winner and they return to their starting positions to repeat the procedure. When one has accumulated 15 points in this way, he wins the match.

The total amount of action in a match is generally less than two minutes. Now there must be about a thousand ways you could improve on this. You could, for instance, allow or even encourage surprise attacks. You could have tag-team matches or require competitors to fence blindfolded after being spun around just enough to make them wobbly.

You could arm one competitor with a sword and the other with, say, a pikestaff. Almost any change, frankly, would be an improvement.

Even so, I quite got into it. Because there are four matches going on at once, it's wonderfully lively and chaotic, with various corners of the auditorium erupting in applause or dismay at different moments.

I stayed for two hours, hopelessly bewildered but also captivated by the noise and passion and the mystifying, unfathomable swiftness of each frantic engagement.

Eventually, and with some reluctance, I bestirred myself and moved on to the nearby judo hall. This is another sport I have never paid much attention to, and I had vaguely imagined it to be like a Jackie Chan movie. I don't suppose I actually expected the competitors to leap into play from awnings or the roofs of passing buses or to loft each other improbable distances with nifty reverse kicks to the solar plexus, but I did expect something a little more vigorous than the sight of two people in leisure wear circling slowly, and indeed interminably, while trying slyly to take each other's shirts off.

I watched for more than an hour, but I must confess that the appeal of judo entirely eluded me.

And so, I regret to say, it proved wherever I went - to the weightlifting, the Greco-Roman wrestling, a little more of the fencing.

Even the boxing let me down. Olympic boxing matches last only four rounds, barely enough to raise a sweat, and are based on a complex system of scoring I couldn't begin to deduce. The thing about boxing in the real world is that it pretty regularly ends with one person horizontal and no doubt about the outcome.

Here I watched with a respectful air, but almost never could I guess whose arm would be raised in triumph at the end of the match.

I was about to give up on my

experiment, and take myself off to the mainstream sports, when I decided to give it one last try.

At Homebush Bay I slipped away from the hordes heading for the track and field and stepped into an unobtrusive-looking building in one of the lonelier corners of Olympic Park. This was the table tennis venue.

Here at last was something I not only understood, but could positively identify with. I have played table tennis myself, of course, and this was fundamentally like table tennis at home, except that nobody ever accidentally squashed a ball or interrupted a game to have a smoke.

But everything else - the system of scoring, the changing of servers after each five points, and so on - was familiar and known.

Because I could so closely follow the play, I realised at once, with a jarring sense of awe, just how far beyond me these people were.

I don't mean beyond me now when I am old and stout and slow and haven't played in years. I mean beyond anything I could ever have been in my prime and in my wildest dreams.

There was a Chinese woman named Wang Nan who had a serve I could see even from fifty rows back that I would never be able to return. I mean literally never.

Then it occurred to me that precisely this level of attainment is what I had witnessed at the other events.

I suppose this should have been obvious, but to me it was a revelation.

Every person I had seen was just too quick and deft and skilled for me. They had taken their capabilities to a level so superlative and advanced that they demanded, and deserved, the most exacting attention. The fault, in short, was not with the sport, but with me.

Well, I felt like a complete schmuck, of course. I had been privileged to see the greatest masters in the world in their chosen fields of endeavour, and I hadn't appreciated it at all.

I vowed that henceforth I would watch all minor Olympic sports (except possibly synchronised swimming) with a new respect and attentiveness. I may even give judo another try.

On the other hand, I still think the idea of blindfolding the fencers really is worth considering.