Today, the IOC announced that Fencing will have 2 more medals at Tokyo 2020 – for Men’s and Women’s Team events. This puts Fencing up to 12 medals to award – one for every event.
In recent history, Fencing has been rotating team events every Olympic Games in order to ensure that there are enough medals for all individual events. The need to rotate events was created when Women’s Saber team and individual events were added to the program. Fencing was not granted additional medals to award. This created a 2 medal deficit, which was worked around by rotating events. Now that there are two more medals awarded to the sport, Tokyo 2020 will be the first event to grant gold medals to all 6 individual events and all 6 team events in one year.