Olympic fencing keeps foil, épée, and sabre—not singlestick
Fencing is sword sport in three weapons—foil, épée, and sabre—each with its own target and priority rules. Singlestick appeared at the 1904 Olympics then vanished from the program. The Lausanne-based FIE now unites 155 national federations under shared bout rules.
Bouts end when a fencer reaches a set hit total or leads when time expires. Pool bouts run to 5 hits or one 3-minute period, while knockout bouts go to 15 hits across three 3-minute periods with a minute's rest between them. Team matches field three fencers a side in nine bouts, every fencer meeting each opponent, until one team reaches 45 hits. Each bout opens and closes with a salute, and the sport's speed and tactics have earned it the nickname high-speed chess.
The FIE sets the rules for world cups, world championships and the Olympics from its Swiss headquarters and weighs rule changes at an annual congress. The oldest surviving Western treatise, the Royal Armouries Ms. I.33 or Tower manuscript, was written around 1300 in what is now Germany and covers sword and buckler. From the sixteenth century Italian fencing was led by the Bolognese school of Filippo Dardi, a fencing master who also taught geometry at the University of Bologna. Modern mechanics grew from eighteenth-century Italian teaching refined by the French school.
Domenico Angelo pushed the shift from military training to sport, opening Angelo's School of Arms at Carlisle House in Soho, London, in 1763, where he fixed rules of posture and footwork still used today. The French master Camille Prévost set down basic conventions in the 1880s, and the first regularised competition took place in June 1880 at the Grand Military Tournament and Assault at Arms in Islington, with bouts to five hits and foil tips blackened to help judges. Fencing joined the Olympics in 1896; sabre has appeared at every Summer Games, foil at all but 1908, and épée at all but 1896. Electrical scoring arrived for épée in 1933 through the Laurent-Pagan apparatus, with foil automated in 1956.
Source: Fencing
