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| Photo: Serge Timacheff |
At the recent FIE Congress meeting, the FIE executive committee announced that the Men’s Team Epee and Women’s Team Sabre events will be excluded from the 2012 Olympic Games.
In other votes, the city of Catania, Italy won the bid to host the 2011 senior world championships over Tianjin, China, and Budapest, Hungary. Various proposals that seemed design to add weight to European results were defeated.
The decision to remove Men’s Epee and Women’s Sabre from the Olympic events for London 2012 follows on the rotation of team events included in the Olympic Games. When women’s sabre first became an Olympic event in 2004, the IOC refused to allocate additional medals for the fencing events, so the FIE compromised by agreeing to remove two (team) events with each rotation.
In 2004 Women’s Team Sabre and Women’s Team Foil were not contested and in 2008 Men’s Team Foil and Women’s Team Epee sat.
According to one attendee at the Congress, the FIE executive committee attempted to hold off on the announcement of which team events would be excluded until after the 2010 Junior World Championships "so that federation would not abandon budgets and training for this season in the removed weapons." This created quite a stir amongst the members of the Congress, so the FIE finally made the announcement.
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| Sam Cheris. Photo: Serge Timacheff |
Sam Cheris, one of the US delagates to the FIE congress confirmed the team event decision and noted that the proposals to weight points more for European zonals or to eliminate zonals were withdrawn.
Additionally the recent incident regarding the ‘visor’ mask is still under investigation and as such no additional action was taken by the FIE at the Congress.