Want opera at the Asian Games? Come to fencing

HANGZHOU – The smile

Amita Berthier

wears tells you about her day. It’s resigned and weary. It can’t hide her pain or conceal her frustration. She’s standing at the mixed zone talking to the press about a chance slipped away. Athletes barely digest defeat when they have to explain it. This is sport.

The 22-year-old came to win a medal in the women’s individual foil but she fell in the quarter-finals on Monday. Yet she left us with the few marvellous, mad minutes of what constitutes a sporting moment. The ancient Greeks, who began the Olympics, wouldn’t have cared about medal tallies, they would have come for such drama.

For moments like the one which made coach Amgad Khazbak bellow.

“Nice, Amita, nice”.

Khazbak hails from Egypt, teaches in Kentucky and is hollering for a Singaporean. He’s on his feet, Berthier is dancing wearily on hers. In Singapore, Berthier’s mother, Uma, is following the live score on her laptop as her daughter trails 2-7, 5-10, 12-14.

At 15, the match will end. 

It’s a classic sporting moment, a match on the line, which shakes loose the competitive beast in humans. What brings us to arenas? Precisely this. As James Ramsey Ullman, writer and mountaineer, wrote: “Challenge is the core and the mainspring of all human activity. If there’s an ocean, we cross it; if there’s a disease, we cure it; if there’s a wrong, we right it; if there’s a record, we break it; and finally, if there’s a mountain, we climb it.”

And so Berthier claws her way to 13-14.

Then to 14-14.

Fencing is not what you think it is. Competitors quietly wheel in their weapons – all evening Berthier kept changing hers – in a bag which is a sort of lighter cousin of what golfers use. They wear white and it all feels dainty and elegant, till an opera unfolds.

The fencer’s face is obscured by a mask yet nothing is concealed. You can see it in the roars, the fist pumps, the leaps, the protests, the tension of the judges’ deliberations, the helmets irately ripped off like plaster from an unhealed wound. It’s so intense Zorro would back away.

Earlier in the day, a China-South Korea men’s sabre match ends like a Bollywood film. Coaches gesticulate wildly and fencers fall dramatically to their knees. At the end, both men are on the floor, the Chinese defeated, the Korean booed. Then they shake hands. Here tradition and theatre meet in a sharp embrace.

Berthier fits this mayhem nicely, a fencer of quivering intensity, and yet all day she lives dangerously. In the pool stage, where she fights six rivals, she loses four matches – each a race to five points – after being 4-4. And so at 14-14 in the round of 16 she has to be rattled. When it’s been tight, she has slipped.

Later, she says: “I probably was a bit nervous in the beginning and I think I didn’t believe in myself as much as I should have... But I recharged after the pools and took a different approach... I’m going to fight no matter who I fence.”

And so she fights, she screams, she wins 15-14, like a climber with torn nails hauling herself over a cliff. It’s magnetic to watch, it’s exhausting to achieve. And it’s going to cost her. In the quarter-final, she’s tired and loses 11-15 and Khazbak tells The Straits Times, “in the end she said, ‘I cannot hold my foil’.”

There’s a Red Bull film on YouTube on foil fencing and in it a race car appears and so does a gun. The comparisons are overstated but we get it, the foil – a 90cm blade like a metal snake – moves fast. At that speed, to think clearly when tired, is hard.

Khazbak insists Berthier got “a lot of bad calls” from the referee in the round of 16 and deserved to win it earlier. Berthier feels she had too short a break between her round-of-16 match with Uzbekistan’s Umida Ilyosova and her quarter-final against South Korea’s Hong Se-na. The Korean had fought in the first series of last-16 matches and thus had a longer break.

But both step away from excuse. Khazbak shrugs: “This is sport”. Berthier confesses: “I still should be beating my opponents, no matter how I tired I was.”

The one guarantee of sport is that it will surprise, that it will feel unfair, that circumstances will be cruel. The only thing is to be ready and Berthier knows. “I have to go back to the books,” she says, “and see maybe my stamina is not good enough to win.”

And so this is how this Games mostly is, it’s about athletes bruised, lessons learnt, promises made, positives clung onto. Berthier, helmet off, dissatisfaction written on her face, walks away. Defeat becomes fuel but in the moment it just hurts. A proud fencer left us a memory but really she came to leave her mark.