In einer eMail vom 9/26/2005 9:19:09 PM W. Europe Daylight Time schreibt
ewmyers@...:

All bouts will be fenced standard, with a director and four side judges.



This raises a question always lurking: What does "standard" mean? Over here
we gave a lot of thought to rules and use Walter Green's concordance of
pre-1930 ones. I have received word of occasional last-minute rule changes and
so on, artifacts of a lack of standards. Maybe the one innovation--if that's
what it is--is that we have adopted a much shorter strip, 6.3 meters or 20
feet. We did so because of earlier precedents (although strips even longer
than
the 40-foot Olympic standard were used back when) and because we actually
monitored and measured free bouting without a formal piste in place. Obviously
we were starting from premises based on long-established concepts of
distance in the engagement. But another, convergent, item on the agenda was
safety: we wanted to prevent rushing assaults and compel focus on technique.
The
result, though I wouldn't call it "scientific" because of acknowledged biases,
was that the distance people more or less or "clustered" around fell into
that 20-foot range. We also decided--this was based on my experience of US
classical tournament officiating, which seemed, frankly, as susceptible to
distortion as that in sport competition and suffered from a dearth of
experienced
judges to support directing--to require fencers to give an account of how
they achieved (and received) a touch. In an era when male sport fencers are
wearing plastic chest protectors to make the new foil tips slide off without
registering, we figured Lady Honor needs as much help as she can get.
This--rational accounting--was first incorporated in the curriculum for
learning
purposes but seemed applicable otherwise.

Bill Leckie
Klassisches Fechten Soest
_flanconade@..._ (mailto:flanconade@...)
_soestfechten@..._ (mailto:soestfechten@...)


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]