Fencing
Now Columbia isn’t known for its sporting prowess. There are, however, a handful of sports in which we excel. These sports are characterized by being very… “preppy”. Fencing and Golf are but two examples. If we had a polo team, I’m sure we’d be pretty good at that too. A few weekends ago, the spec photographers went on a little training shoot with the fencers.
Just to give you a first indication of just how good we are… this weekend, we played Yale and Brown and we drew with Yale in one thing… this is considered bad. In other sports, where loosing by a small margin is considered good because we’re so terrible, in fencing… we kinda have a habit of winning all the time.
It is difficult to identify our fencers in a world where everyone is clad from head to toe in almost exactly the same gear.
This one is participating in sabre… the target area for sabre is the upper torso and arms, foil is just the torso and for epee, it is the entire body. This girl lost, which was a pretty sure indication that she wasn’t from Columbia.
And sure enough… her opponent was one of ours. Identifiable by the single light-blue sock (whoever thought of that? actually, it’s kinda cool in a quirky way)
Oh… did I mention that we were good? I do believe that some of our fencers will be going to the Olympic Games in Beijing.
Apparently our coach is like… the olympic coach, or some other highly-ranked coach-thing in the whole fencing deal.
Oh it feels good to get a hit in.
Fencing looks like so much fun, I feel like taking it up.
These guys didn’t seem at all bashful about sporting their team USA gear.
ooohhh… watch where you’re putting that foil…
Hey dude, that’s my leg, that’s not a target area…
ok, so it isn’t quite as elegant as the stuff in the three musketeers movies, but it’s still pretty cool
Something tells me that having long legs and a bit of flexibility goes a long way.
…as does being able to bend over backwards to score a hit.
awwww…. good sportsmanship… of course, back in the good ol’ days, you wouldn’t have had to do this because your opponent would have been dead.
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