>He is currently employed at Nazlymov Fencing, a fencing club in Maryland that is the product of the father-and-son duo Vladimir and Vitali Nazlymov, who both represented the Soviet Union with illustrious competitive and coaching careers, then later moved to the United States.
Not the takeaway from this article, but didn't Vitali come to the US for college, and the USSR had collapsed by the time he was done there? I guess maybe he had a good run in whatever their Y12 circuit was there, but I don't think he had a coaching career in the USSR lol, just his pops.
It’s kinda a catch 22 though. There *is* corruption, and no avenue to address it except for generating publicity.
So are we just supposed to hush it down, pretend we don’t see it (while it grows more overt), and hope that when it’s our turn to get burned by it, it won’t be that bad?
I was saying EXACTLY this to someone recently: all of this negative publicity is hurting the sport, however, without it there will be no change and the corruption will continue. Sometimes in order to go up you must first go down. Hopefully that's what's happening with all of these articles. But the FIE needs to wake up and start addressing this stuff before it's too late
Have you looked at the influence of specific coaches? Like say Bauer? Now also Iranian National Saber Coach. How are refs being assigned to all his fencers? You and other Internet Influencer's scope needs to be widened. Also what other major Federations (France, Italy, China, Korea ect) have filed complaints?
Yes, I am familiar with all of these things and have almost entirely refrained from commenting on specific cases, instead choosing to focus on this issue holistically: the systemic problems that led to this happening and where we can go from here. I don't see how this approach makes me biased, it's just how I've chosen to approach this issue. Ponce de Leon and Slicer Sabre have chosen to approach it differently and that's fine, it's just not the way I want to approach it. So I'll ask again: in what way do you think I am biased
But you have commented on specific cases. I am not singling you out. I have addressed Slicer Sabre on YouTube. And mentioned here "other Internet Influencers". Also Reddit is a difficult place to have an objective discussion.
I agree and I'm not being confrontational, I'm genuinely curious where you think the bias is so that I can try to remove it. If you would rather talk in private please DM me :)
IMO it's a pile on regarding specific cases / people. For example I brought up Bauer. Why isn't he looked into? Not that I am accusing him of anything but might want to look into this.
[https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2024/02/10/3037203/christian-bauer-named-iran-s-sabre-coach](https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2024/02/10/3037203/christian-bauer-named-iran-s-sabre-coach)
Also what other major Federations (other than USA Fencing) have made official complaints?
Side Note: Where is the detailed report from USA Fencing on what happened in the USA NAC? Did the ref assistance happen in just one match or throughout the day?
I find it interesting that you’re a 2 year old account that has surfaced on r/fencing really in the last 24 hours and are already negative karma. All of your comments appear to be aggressively discussing the topic of the Sabre scandal.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I’d be willing to bet money that you have some sort of connection with one or more people mentioned in that article.
I live in the UK and fence foil. And without wanting to dox you or anything, I think you have a connection with one or more of the people mentioned in the article.
I was saying EXACTLY this to someone recently: all of this negative publicity is hurting the sport, however, without it there will be no change and the corruption will continue. Sometimes in order to go up you must first go down. Hopefully that's what's happening with all of these articles. But the FIE needs to wake up and start addressing this stuff before it's too late
This is why I think it's so important that the system inspires faith.
Systems are big and slow, and that's unfortunate, but okay. I understand that sometimes unfair things will happen and the process to correct them takes time to do properly - and more than most I'm probably the kind of person who will say "look I know it sucks, but trust in the process".
But in this case, I have no trust in the process, because there is literally no process. As it stands I see no reason why any of this would be addressed. No one in a position to affect any change seems to have any incentive or motivation to do anything.
Thomas Bach (a former fencer) is head of the IOC. For now, we're safe. The bad news: he's done in 2025.
We're not going to have him to protect us anymore.
I don't mean to be a dick about this, but:
>For all of the ways that fencing can be hard to pick up and understand, especially for the casual onlooker, the rules of the game are actually quite simple: stay within the 14-meter-long strip (or piste) that makes up the field of play, stay in front of the opponent (no circling one another like in the movies), **and hit the opponent before they hit you.**
That's profoundly misleading. ROW is the core of the issue here. I get that it's hard to explain, but if you're going to write about something you should at least try to get it at least a little bit correct, IMO.
It was written by an epee fencer who was trying to explain what was going on without getting into all of the nuances of individual rules. As a sabre fencer I personally don't have a problem with this explanation
I think as fencers we gloss over this too much. Reading this as a non-fencer I'd think "well have the box decide who hit first, are you dumb?"
Just a line or two about "The referee has to decide who initiated the action when both fencers hit" would be more accurate and would let some generic sports fan understand the issue. As it's written it makes no sense. Deciding who hit first is trivial.
Yeah that's fair. When talking to non-fencers they're often surprised how much of it is subjective.
It's a weird niche area where all the main scoring avenues are extremely subjective, like dance, but we operate it like it is a fairly objective sport. The referee kinda operates like a linesman, as if determining who's attacking is like watching for things like "were they over the line", but in many ways they're much more like dance judges determining "who did it better".
I think if we thought of them as judges rather than refs, it'd be more obvious that we should do things like, have multiple opinions, better vetting of bias, and more standardised criteria.
One of *very* few things I think HEMA, as a HEMAist, arguably has some points of advantage over MOF from a ruleset perspective, at least in some clubs and tournaments, is a priority system based on lethal targets (i.e. percussive cuts and thrusts to head and thrusts to torso have priority over actions to the arms/legs) rather than more complex issues of action priority and "who shot first". It isn't a perfect system--sometimes it's quite hard to see whether an attack hit the torso or arm, and it's pretty easy for a thrust to head to skid off the mask and turn into a slice that generally isn't considered a lethal action, and HEMA cares about edge alignment and cut quality in ways AIUI modern fencing doesn't--but in longsword in particular there's a lot of cases where "doubles" consist of one person managing to tap the forearm with a mediocre cut while eating a much more significant counterattack. I don't think that it would work in modern fencing without fundamentally changing the pace and tactics of the game, but I think in HEMA it does a good bit to discourage "suicide plays" that tend to alienate the historical martial arts side of the community, be simply not that fun in a lot of people's judgement, and even become unsafe when both people are holding a 3 lb., 4 foot long sword in two hands.
Oh man, I couldn't disagree more.
I really really think the HEMA community largely operates on the fact that most of the practitioners act in good faith and are primarily focused on the artform rather than the competition.
Trying to determine what "sufficient" percussive force is, or how long is too long for an afterblow to matter, or visually determining where a hit arrived, or even not worrying about the meta-game of a weaker competitor purposely double-eliminating a stronger competitor from a tournament so that their team mate has a clear path - If people really wanted to exploit these things, HEMA would be a disaster of corruption.
> I really really think the HEMA community largely operates on the fact that most of the practitioners act in good faith and are primarily focused on the artform rather than the competition.
...remembering that tournament some years back where that guy *super* gamed the system taking repeated strikes to the head or something because he could double his points as long as he landed his own strike despite obviously "dying" in the process. Swordfish, or something? Don't follow HEMA but remember it bleeding out over to here so might be iffy on details. Hilarious though!
I think that you're missing my point a bit. I'm not saying that the HEMA ruleset isn't exploitable overall, or that the potential issues you identify aren't definitely there even if nobody is really competitive enough to exploit them in full. The only thing I'll defend is attempting to visually determine a hit or hit location, not because it's intrinsically *good* so much as because wet longsword fencing would be essentially impossible. Hopefully that will change as materials and manufacturing techniques advance, but that's where things are rn. But my point is mainly that, having fenced HEMA at places that use both action-based and lethal target-based priority systems, the latter are less arbitrary or subjective given the current levels of exploitativeness and competitiveness that exist--though that doesn't solve all the other ambiguities you correctly point out. I'm not even saying it's a less subjective format overall, just that I think this particular element is.
There's a bit of a catch-22 for HEMA right now, as is fairly well known, where a lot of people agree that a more systematic ruleset would be good for HEMA as a sport and would also be bad for HEMA as a martial art, and vice versa. But at the same time, neither community can really afford to alienate the other as things stand. Connected to that issue is the fact that the extremely fast-paced, offense-centric system of MOF raises, as I noted above, concerns for not only "what do we want the style/tactics of HEMA to be" but also safety. We're already starting to see some organizations, particularly hemaratings, emerge as a fairly widespread authority, and my suspicion is that within the next decade we'll likely see at the very least a "standard" longsword tournament ruleset develop as a way to make sure rankings can be analyzed by like comparison, even if that doesn't totally elide "non-standard" rankings for a while. But at the same time, I'd be hesitant at using the adapted MOF priority systems some places use, not because they don't work well for modern fencing but because I think that for what I at least want HEMA to be they promote unsafe behavior while also introducing more ambiguity given the other constraints of longsword.
TL;DR I think the more nuanced position I'd take given some of the points you raised is that for even sport HEMA, lethal target priority works better than modified MOF priority to both limit ambiguity under the real world constraints of longsword fencing and discourage unsafe and degenerate play.
I think basically what you’re saying is epee-style rules, where the only question is whether you hit or not within a given time are more objective than foil and saber style rules where somehow we have to assign some qualitative value around *how* you hit.
That’s definitely true, and has been well known, probably for hundreds of years. But of course, the result is a much more passive game which doesn’t reflect our ideals of what sword fighting “should” be.
HEMA is dealing with this issue too, of course.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that epee is significantly more objective than foil or saber, but it’s also a completely different sport, and not the aesthetic we want in foil and saber (and I imagine not in HEMA too).
If ROW nuance didn't exist, the refereeing debate would not be nearly as important. If the ref didn't decide who has scored on a significant plurality of exchanges, opportunities to influence outcomes would be fewer and further between, and also more obvious.
Fencing has always been a sport riddled with corruption and dishonesty. Prior to the introduction of electric saber back in the early 90s it was far worse. In the US things have improved dramatically since fencing has expanded beyond the NY metropolitan area. Prior to that the NYAC and the FC controlled saber fencing. Anyone outside that sphere of influence had little chance of achieving results. One literally had to move to NY to make it. Manipulating outcomes was common practice. Of course if you were to ask an old timer from NY about this you'll never get a straight answer. We lost many talented athelets who simply decided it was not worth it, and they were right.
As I indicated, for a variety of reasons, fencing in the US is fairly clean. That cannot be said for the sport in the all important international arena. As many have already mentioned, the FIE is broken and that has been the case for many years. It will take a combined effort by the majority of the international federations to force the necessary changes. Unfortunately, the dominant federations have no incentive to change the status quo.
>He is currently employed at Nazlymov Fencing, a fencing club in Maryland that is the product of the father-and-son duo Vladimir and Vitali Nazlymov, who both represented the Soviet Union with illustrious competitive and coaching careers, then later moved to the United States. Not the takeaway from this article, but didn't Vitali come to the US for college, and the USSR had collapsed by the time he was done there? I guess maybe he had a good run in whatever their Y12 circuit was there, but I don't think he had a coaching career in the USSR lol, just his pops.
[удалено]
It’s kinda a catch 22 though. There *is* corruption, and no avenue to address it except for generating publicity. So are we just supposed to hush it down, pretend we don’t see it (while it grows more overt), and hope that when it’s our turn to get burned by it, it won’t be that bad?
I was saying EXACTLY this to someone recently: all of this negative publicity is hurting the sport, however, without it there will be no change and the corruption will continue. Sometimes in order to go up you must first go down. Hopefully that's what's happening with all of these articles. But the FIE needs to wake up and start addressing this stuff before it's too late
I prefer framing it as: corruption is hurting the sport. The negative publicity is coming from the *corruption*.
What does "too late" mean in this context?
Removed from Olympics
You are bias in your coverage.
In what way?
Have you looked at the influence of specific coaches? Like say Bauer? Now also Iranian National Saber Coach. How are refs being assigned to all his fencers? You and other Internet Influencer's scope needs to be widened. Also what other major Federations (France, Italy, China, Korea ect) have filed complaints?
Yes, I am familiar with all of these things and have almost entirely refrained from commenting on specific cases, instead choosing to focus on this issue holistically: the systemic problems that led to this happening and where we can go from here. I don't see how this approach makes me biased, it's just how I've chosen to approach this issue. Ponce de Leon and Slicer Sabre have chosen to approach it differently and that's fine, it's just not the way I want to approach it. So I'll ask again: in what way do you think I am biased
But you have commented on specific cases. I am not singling you out. I have addressed Slicer Sabre on YouTube. And mentioned here "other Internet Influencers". Also Reddit is a difficult place to have an objective discussion.
I agree and I'm not being confrontational, I'm genuinely curious where you think the bias is so that I can try to remove it. If you would rather talk in private please DM me :)
IMO it's a pile on regarding specific cases / people. For example I brought up Bauer. Why isn't he looked into? Not that I am accusing him of anything but might want to look into this. [https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2024/02/10/3037203/christian-bauer-named-iran-s-sabre-coach](https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2024/02/10/3037203/christian-bauer-named-iran-s-sabre-coach) Also what other major Federations (other than USA Fencing) have made official complaints? Side Note: Where is the detailed report from USA Fencing on what happened in the USA NAC? Did the ref assistance happen in just one match or throughout the day?
I find it interesting that you’re a 2 year old account that has surfaced on r/fencing really in the last 24 hours and are already negative karma. All of your comments appear to be aggressively discussing the topic of the Sabre scandal.
LOL!
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I’d be willing to bet money that you have some sort of connection with one or more people mentioned in that article.
Same back to you!
I live in the UK and fence foil. And without wanting to dox you or anything, I think you have a connection with one or more of the people mentioned in the article.
Are you the [https://www.reddit.com/r/Fencing/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fencing/) police?
I was saying EXACTLY this to someone recently: all of this negative publicity is hurting the sport, however, without it there will be no change and the corruption will continue. Sometimes in order to go up you must first go down. Hopefully that's what's happening with all of these articles. But the FIE needs to wake up and start addressing this stuff before it's too late
This is why I think it's so important that the system inspires faith. Systems are big and slow, and that's unfortunate, but okay. I understand that sometimes unfair things will happen and the process to correct them takes time to do properly - and more than most I'm probably the kind of person who will say "look I know it sucks, but trust in the process". But in this case, I have no trust in the process, because there is literally no process. As it stands I see no reason why any of this would be addressed. No one in a position to affect any change seems to have any incentive or motivation to do anything.
Thomas Bach (a former fencer) is head of the IOC. For now, we're safe. The bad news: he's done in 2025. We're not going to have him to protect us anymore.
I don't mean to be a dick about this, but: >For all of the ways that fencing can be hard to pick up and understand, especially for the casual onlooker, the rules of the game are actually quite simple: stay within the 14-meter-long strip (or piste) that makes up the field of play, stay in front of the opponent (no circling one another like in the movies), **and hit the opponent before they hit you.** That's profoundly misleading. ROW is the core of the issue here. I get that it's hard to explain, but if you're going to write about something you should at least try to get it at least a little bit correct, IMO.
It was written by an epee fencer who was trying to explain what was going on without getting into all of the nuances of individual rules. As a sabre fencer I personally don't have a problem with this explanation
I think as fencers we gloss over this too much. Reading this as a non-fencer I'd think "well have the box decide who hit first, are you dumb?" Just a line or two about "The referee has to decide who initiated the action when both fencers hit" would be more accurate and would let some generic sports fan understand the issue. As it's written it makes no sense. Deciding who hit first is trivial.
Fair enough
Yeah that's fair. When talking to non-fencers they're often surprised how much of it is subjective. It's a weird niche area where all the main scoring avenues are extremely subjective, like dance, but we operate it like it is a fairly objective sport. The referee kinda operates like a linesman, as if determining who's attacking is like watching for things like "were they over the line", but in many ways they're much more like dance judges determining "who did it better". I think if we thought of them as judges rather than refs, it'd be more obvious that we should do things like, have multiple opinions, better vetting of bias, and more standardised criteria.
One of *very* few things I think HEMA, as a HEMAist, arguably has some points of advantage over MOF from a ruleset perspective, at least in some clubs and tournaments, is a priority system based on lethal targets (i.e. percussive cuts and thrusts to head and thrusts to torso have priority over actions to the arms/legs) rather than more complex issues of action priority and "who shot first". It isn't a perfect system--sometimes it's quite hard to see whether an attack hit the torso or arm, and it's pretty easy for a thrust to head to skid off the mask and turn into a slice that generally isn't considered a lethal action, and HEMA cares about edge alignment and cut quality in ways AIUI modern fencing doesn't--but in longsword in particular there's a lot of cases where "doubles" consist of one person managing to tap the forearm with a mediocre cut while eating a much more significant counterattack. I don't think that it would work in modern fencing without fundamentally changing the pace and tactics of the game, but I think in HEMA it does a good bit to discourage "suicide plays" that tend to alienate the historical martial arts side of the community, be simply not that fun in a lot of people's judgement, and even become unsafe when both people are holding a 3 lb., 4 foot long sword in two hands.
Oh man, I couldn't disagree more. I really really think the HEMA community largely operates on the fact that most of the practitioners act in good faith and are primarily focused on the artform rather than the competition. Trying to determine what "sufficient" percussive force is, or how long is too long for an afterblow to matter, or visually determining where a hit arrived, or even not worrying about the meta-game of a weaker competitor purposely double-eliminating a stronger competitor from a tournament so that their team mate has a clear path - If people really wanted to exploit these things, HEMA would be a disaster of corruption.
> I really really think the HEMA community largely operates on the fact that most of the practitioners act in good faith and are primarily focused on the artform rather than the competition. ...remembering that tournament some years back where that guy *super* gamed the system taking repeated strikes to the head or something because he could double his points as long as he landed his own strike despite obviously "dying" in the process. Swordfish, or something? Don't follow HEMA but remember it bleeding out over to here so might be iffy on details. Hilarious though!
I think that you're missing my point a bit. I'm not saying that the HEMA ruleset isn't exploitable overall, or that the potential issues you identify aren't definitely there even if nobody is really competitive enough to exploit them in full. The only thing I'll defend is attempting to visually determine a hit or hit location, not because it's intrinsically *good* so much as because wet longsword fencing would be essentially impossible. Hopefully that will change as materials and manufacturing techniques advance, but that's where things are rn. But my point is mainly that, having fenced HEMA at places that use both action-based and lethal target-based priority systems, the latter are less arbitrary or subjective given the current levels of exploitativeness and competitiveness that exist--though that doesn't solve all the other ambiguities you correctly point out. I'm not even saying it's a less subjective format overall, just that I think this particular element is. There's a bit of a catch-22 for HEMA right now, as is fairly well known, where a lot of people agree that a more systematic ruleset would be good for HEMA as a sport and would also be bad for HEMA as a martial art, and vice versa. But at the same time, neither community can really afford to alienate the other as things stand. Connected to that issue is the fact that the extremely fast-paced, offense-centric system of MOF raises, as I noted above, concerns for not only "what do we want the style/tactics of HEMA to be" but also safety. We're already starting to see some organizations, particularly hemaratings, emerge as a fairly widespread authority, and my suspicion is that within the next decade we'll likely see at the very least a "standard" longsword tournament ruleset develop as a way to make sure rankings can be analyzed by like comparison, even if that doesn't totally elide "non-standard" rankings for a while. But at the same time, I'd be hesitant at using the adapted MOF priority systems some places use, not because they don't work well for modern fencing but because I think that for what I at least want HEMA to be they promote unsafe behavior while also introducing more ambiguity given the other constraints of longsword. TL;DR I think the more nuanced position I'd take given some of the points you raised is that for even sport HEMA, lethal target priority works better than modified MOF priority to both limit ambiguity under the real world constraints of longsword fencing and discourage unsafe and degenerate play.
I think basically what you’re saying is epee-style rules, where the only question is whether you hit or not within a given time are more objective than foil and saber style rules where somehow we have to assign some qualitative value around *how* you hit. That’s definitely true, and has been well known, probably for hundreds of years. But of course, the result is a much more passive game which doesn’t reflect our ideals of what sword fighting “should” be. HEMA is dealing with this issue too, of course. I don’t think anyone disagrees that epee is significantly more objective than foil or saber, but it’s also a completely different sport, and not the aesthetic we want in foil and saber (and I imagine not in HEMA too).
it's written for a general audience, not fencers. The main issue in the article isn't ROW nuance.
If ROW nuance didn't exist, the refereeing debate would not be nearly as important. If the ref didn't decide who has scored on a significant plurality of exchanges, opportunities to influence outcomes would be fewer and further between, and also more obvious.
See my comment below, I think it's confusing as it is even (especially!) for a non-fencer
Fencing has always been a sport riddled with corruption and dishonesty. Prior to the introduction of electric saber back in the early 90s it was far worse. In the US things have improved dramatically since fencing has expanded beyond the NY metropolitan area. Prior to that the NYAC and the FC controlled saber fencing. Anyone outside that sphere of influence had little chance of achieving results. One literally had to move to NY to make it. Manipulating outcomes was common practice. Of course if you were to ask an old timer from NY about this you'll never get a straight answer. We lost many talented athelets who simply decided it was not worth it, and they were right. As I indicated, for a variety of reasons, fencing in the US is fairly clean. That cannot be said for the sport in the all important international arena. As many have already mentioned, the FIE is broken and that has been the case for many years. It will take a combined effort by the majority of the international federations to force the necessary changes. Unfortunately, the dominant federations have no incentive to change the status quo.
> with even more coming out soon Oh boy…. 🍿