By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The one other celebrated drug case involved the Italian Dorina Vaccaroni, world foil champion in 1983. At a top competition in Germany the previous year Vaccaroni, just eighteen, reached the final, where “she fenced like a maniac—I’d never seen her fence like that before,” her opponent, Cornelia Hanisch, told me. Vaccaroni then tested positive for a banned substance that in small doses acts as a stimulant but in substantial doses can induce epilepsy. Although Vaccaroni denied knowingly using a prohibited substance, the German girl was awarded the championship.

  4. Illicit equipment. In the 1936 Olympics the defending épée champion, Giancarlo Cornaggia-Medici, said to possess the most precise stop-thrust ever developed, was fighting in the quarterfinals when he became perplexed by three successive double hits. He stopped and asked for the length of his adversary’s weapon to be measured. It was found to be just half an inch over the limit.

  More recently, a German fencer took to varnishing the top half of the point of his épée. When he tested his weapon on his opponent’s guard at the beginning of a fight to ensure that no hit would register on the coquille (the steel guard), he carefully made contact with the lower half of his point, so that nothing seemed untoward; then, once the fight started, the varnish, effectively becoming the “target” that the German’s épée was hitting, caused the electric box to register as soon as he struck anything hard—a free hit to the German. In the meantime, the hit rubbed off the incriminating varnish.

  In a similar move, an American Olympic épéeist would come en garde with a thin circle of tape on his finger, which, after the weapons had been tested, he would slip onto his épée tip, causing the electric box to register as soon as the épée struck any target, valid or not, then peel away the tape before a referee could check his weapon. In each case, the cheating gained only one hit; but at international level one hit per fight is a huge advantage.

  5. Fights are bought and sold. In the run-up to the 2000 Olympics, a Spanish fencer in an “A” grade saber tournament in Athens needed to beat a leading Russian, thrice world champion. The Spaniard won, thus gaining his berth to Sydney. The price of victory was said to have been $3,000. When I asked the tournament’s leading administrator about it, he said, “I am sure it was only $2,000.” Everyone at the competition knew what had happened, but versions of this story are commonplace. After the Polish saber squad had qualified for the Sydney Games, they went off to one of the season’s remaining competitions, in the words of their team manager, “knowing that it wouldn’t hurt them to lose, and it was their chance to make some good money.”

  6. “Arranged” fights. For years each of the stronger nations would decide, usually at the final stage, who on its team had the best chance of ultimate victory, and the weaker members would be ordered to throw their bouts to the designated standard-bearer. In the individual foil final of the 1924 Olympics, unusually of twelve fencers, four Italians, Puliti, Marcello Bertinetti, Bini, and Giulio Sarocchi, qualified. To make “arranged” fights harder (purely in the sense that the nation cheating had to put its money on the right man—and there have been many cases when it got it wrong), members of the same national team are required to fight off against one another first: Oreste Puliti beat his three compatriots with ease. The judges were not happy and, led by Imre Kovács of Hungary, maintained that the three losers had thrown their bouts. Outraged, Puliti threatened to cane Kovács and was summarily disqualified. The other three Italians walked out in protest.

  Two days later Puliti and Kovács ran into each other at a music hall. Words were exchanged. Kovács told Puliti he couldn’t understand a word of Italian, whereupon the furious fencer struck him in the face, saying that Kovács surely couldn’t fail to understand that. The two were pulled apart, but further words passed and a formal duel called for. Four months later Puliti and Kovács faced each other just over the Hungarian frontier. Puliti attacked at once, wounding Kovács in the arm, and the president stopped the fight; Kovács’s wound was dressed and the two embraced, parting the best of friends. “Vive le sport!” What may in part have fueled Puliti’s wrath was that for years he had not been allowed the chance to fight for the gold medal cleanly. As his obituary recorded in 1958, “the politics of fencing, officially denied and declared mere fiction by all team captains throughout the centuries, kept him in second or third place at the height of his athletic powers.”6

  In the 1958 épée world championships, the final pool of eight contained five Italians (led by the redoubtable Eduardo Mangiarotti, already three times champion); two Russians; and a lone Englishman, W. H. F. “Bill” Hoskyns. One by one the Italians dutifully lost to Mangiarotti; Hoskyns beat the two Russians. In consequence, however, Mangiarotti was hardly warmed up when he came to fence the Russians and lost to both. He then beat Hoskyns easily, but having suffered two defeats had to watch as Hoskyns triumphed over each of his compatriots, to end with six victories and the world title. Mangiarotti beat his head against the wall. Had he fenced “cleanly,” he would likely have won.

  7. Intimidation and seduction. Nearly all fencers try to influence referees and juries by body language or open appeals for favor, and nearly all fencers play to the gallery. A seasoned American international described the sport as “90 percent marketing, 10 percent skill.” That is deliberately putting it high, but undoubtedly there is a charm to deception that is paramount in some people’s makeup. Is this cheating? Most fencers would see the question as a matter of degree. The operatic Italian sabreur Mario Aldo Montano, fighting a top Russian in a world semifinal in 1971, at the end of one phrase, strutted round the entire stadium, clucking a victory chant like an inebriated cockerel. He returned to the strip only to discover that the referee had awarded the touch to his opponent. He simply grinned. The next year Italy was up against the Soviet Union in the team final, and Montano had the deciding bout. He had already been warned by the referee for taking off his mask to protest decisions he didn’t like;7 another such display would cost him a hit and as the score was at 4–all would thus lose him and his country the match. When he scored (as he thought) the winning touch, he made to tear off his mask in victory before the referee had made any decision. As one man, his teammates fell upon him to ensure he kept his mask on—and won the gold.

  Italians are past masters of working round the rules. After a long run of triumphs up through the 1950s, their fencing slumped and a new manager, Attillo Fini, was appointed. He decided that for Italy to regain its position he would not only have to act as a virtual dictator over his fencers but also work his way to ascendancy over juries and referees. By the early 1970s Italy was back at the top. Rival nations watched in horror but generally did nothing. One Bulgarian referee was so knavishly pro-Italian that on retirement he was given a top coaching post in Turin and his wife a job with Fiat. Some time later, he moved back to Sofia.§

  8. Combines. During the 1960s and 1970s Hungary had an outstanding épée squad in which nearly everyone was qualified as a doctor, engineer, lawyer, or diplomat. It was also renowned for being difficult.8 Among them they helped promote this “acceptable” form of cheating, which was to bedevil fencing for more than twenty years. The combine is the trading of a bout, usually between fencers from different countries, for a future favor. It is difficult to say precisely when the practice began, but by the late 1960s it was rife. The FIE hurried to change the rules for major championships—five times between 1960 and 1970—but this gesture only confused officials and fencers alike, while failing in its objective: for the combine continued and wore itself out only in the 1990s, when direct elimination was introduced.9

  Combines took various forms, but in the main there were three variations: in rounds before the final, a weak fencer might have a fight thrown to him to ensure that his victory would eliminate a feared rival; a fencer who already knew midway through a pool that he was going to be eliminated could throw a fight advantageously to another; or—the dominant form—in exchange for a victory in the immediate round a fencer would repay the de
bt in the following round, or when the fencers next met. Combines featured frequently in semifinals, where seeding was no longer relevant and the “losing” fencer thus lost nothing by ceding a fight. It is said that the 1964 Olympic épée champion, Gregori Kriss, won a Russian championship in which all seven cofinalists owed him their fight.

  The Hungarian épéeists put a refinement on this procedure—almost a purification. They saw themselves as professional sportsmen who, in a Communist society, needed to maintain a high rate of success to ensure their standard of living. They had no time for “lucky” amateurs on a hot streak or second-tier fencers sneaking an unwarranted victory and used the combine to weed out weaker épéeists, so that that the final pool of six would contain the “right” fencers. Once these six had successfully won through, they could fence among themselves to decide the winner. It was cheating, but with its own subversive logic.

  Everything depended on trust, and a peculiar code of honor grew up to regulate the combine and other forms of cheating. As combine deals could often be struck only in snatched interchanges, there was ample room for misunderstanding. On one occasion Jerzy Pawłowski was approached by the Hungarians in midcompetition with word that Rudolf Kárpáti would give him a fight but expected to be repaid in the final. No deal, said Pawłowski; he intended to win the bout anyway, as he duly did, against Kárpáti’s lackluster opposition. Come the final, Kárpáti, expecting repayment, was incensed not to receive it. “I want it back,” he snarled in Russian. Pawłowski replied, “I never took it”—and went on to win their second bout as well.

  General acceptance of the combine reached the point that, after the individual saber of the 1987 world championships, the silver medalist, Geörgy Nebald of Hungary, raged to a leading newspaper that he had lost in the final because one judge, a Canadian sabreur who had been knocked out earlier in the day, had skewed his decisions out of spite at having been the victim of Nebald’s earlier combine. How could the man harbor such a grudge when the gold was at stake?

  Maybe combines weren’t really cheating. Each fencer, after all, was doing what was in his best interests.‖ The FIE was in a quandary. It knew that such an argument was specious, but every one of its senior members represented a country whose fencers were regularly taking part in combines. C. B. Fry again: if all parties agree to cheat, it is no longer cheating (but then neither may it be sport). Anyway, as harassed FIE officials explained, it was almost impossible to prove a case. (John F. Kennedy would regularly quote a Spanish quatrain, in translation: “Bullfight critics, ranked in rows / Crowd the enormous plaza full / But there’s only one who knows / And he’s the man who fights the bull.”)

  The turning point would come in 1971, at the world championships in Vienna. In the women’s foil semifinals, a Romanian, Ana Pascu, who was certain of promotion, gave her bout to the reigning world champion, Galina Gorokhova of the Soviet Union. Pascu’s surrender did not go unobserved (“Thievery!” muttered the Italian camp, whose fencer had been eliminated by the loss), and we were all keen to see whether the Russian would repay the obligation.

  But who was going to accuse the world champion of cheating? The referee in a fencing bout has possibly the widest range of powers, both explicit and discretionary, of any official in sport. He or she is responsible for the flow, interpretation, and scoring of a fight, and also for maintaining proper technique and punishing errors. However, there is a large gap between the provisions of the rulebook and their interpretation and enforcement. Who was to referee the crucial bout?

  The choice fell on Guido Malacarne, an amiable middle-aged bachelor who had never been a top fencer himself but was a regular official with the Italian team. Behind his back the Italians called him “Mr. Coupon-Cutter,” a reference to the monthly dividend he received from a family timber business. For all his intelligence and integrity, he was considered a bit of a joke. So when the Directoire Technique, the officiating body, asked him to take the Gorokhova-Pascu bout it was done condescendingly, the offering of a poisoned chalice: “Now, Guido, you’re the best—the obvious man to take this one.”

  Galina Gorokhova of the Soviet Union, world champion of 1970, awaits to hear whether the organizers of the 1971 championships will disqualify her for cheating. (illustration credit 19.1)

  If the FIE thought Malacarne would buck the challenge, they would soon learn how wrong they were. No one had reckoned with a crucial factor: here was a world final, all of it televised, and the Russian, an intimidating, bulky figure with a hard, morose stare,a was too vain to want to make her “defeat” seem honestly arrived at—she wanted the world to know that she could beat Pascu any time she chose and made no attempt to score until 1–3 down. At this point Malacarne warned her, in his precise French, to fence properly and not to favor her opponent. After a lecture from her coach, she did score two hits to reach 3–all—with one last touch to come.

  The Russian now reverted to her former passivity, with Pascu making desperate attacks, most of which missed and frequently ended with her toppling onto her opponent, who carefully avoided making the decisive hit accidentally. The Directoire Technique hurriedly convened beside the piste and agreed with Malacarne that he should be allowed to disqualify Gorokhova, which he did. The Russians at once appealed, asserting that their fencer had not been feeling well—a liver complaint—and besides, she had scored two hits after the warning. It did no good; at the appeal Gorokhova was expelled by an overwhelming majority.

  At this time I was editing The Sword and invited the American official Marius Valsamis to write about the affair. He entitled his article “The Sheriff of Dodge City,” likening international fencing to a lawless town in which crime, both organized and disorganized, runs rampant. Finally the law-abiding citizens hire a lawman to clean up the town: Wyatt Earp or, in fencing’s case, Malacarne.10 Had the 1971 disqualification been Malacarne’s only intervention, this might have been overstating his contribution, but at the 1975 Pan-American Games he once again took a brave line—during the fight-off for first place between Argentinian and American épéeists. A year later he would play a crucial part in exposing the most dramatic scandal in fencing’s history.

  On July 20, 1976, for the only time ever, a story about fencing appeared on the front page of The New York Times. It was hardly an advertisement for the sport. Filed from the Montreal Olympics under the headline “Soviet Fencer Disqualified for Cheating,” it laid out how an illegal device that had been detected in the épée of a Soviet athlete, Boris Onishenko, fencing in the modern pentathlon, had enabled him to set off the electronic recording machine at will. The disgracing of Onishenko, who was quickly dubbed “Dis-Onishenko,” became a major story of those Games, second only to the orchestrated walkout of more than a dozen African teams to protest South Africa’s apartheid policies.

  At the time of the Montreal Games Onishenko was thirty-eight, nominally a major in the Red Army, with a part-time job teaching at the Dynamo Sports Institute in Kiev and leisure interests in cars, music—and electronics. He had first excelled as a swimmer, but after making the Soviet pentathlon team in 1967 he had established himself as one of the world’s best pentathletes. In the 1972 Olympics he came in second to the Hungarian András “Bandi” Balczo, although Balczo was second to Onishenko in the fencing section.

  No one knows how long Onishenko’s épées had been doctored. His performances had shown remarkable improvement since 1970; without question he was a very fine épéeist and a favorite to win the discipline. Fencing in the pentathlon is sudden death—the first hit in each bout wins—and the individual and team competitions are combined into one and so offer the best return: unlike in the other disciplines, success means another’s failure—every time Onishenko hit an opponent he gained points and they lost them.

  The modern pentathlon began on the first day of the Games with each three-man team fencing off among themselves. Then, at 8:45 A.M., the Soviet Union trio was up against Great Britain’s Adrian Parker, Jim Fox, and Danny Nightingale. “After a
while Adrian Parker and Boris Onishenko faced each other on the piste, had their weapons tested and began fencing,” Malacarne recalled. “An attack from Onishenko made his light go on, and I ruled that Parker had been hit. However, Parker took off his mask and assured me that the hit had not arrived. I pointed out that I had distinctly seen Onishenko’s point go very close to his forearm and that perhaps he had not felt the hit arrive because it landed on a fold of his glove or of his sleeve. Parker again assured me that no hit had arrived, and I therefore proceeded to make a rapid inspection of Onishenko’s épée. The point was marked with the pass sign [i.e., the Games’ armorers had officially approved it, as they were required to do with all swords presented for competition use] as were the blade and coquille, while inside the guard the two wires were separated by a sheet of plastic. I again told Parker that I had no reason to annul the hit, and I signaled to the score table that Parker had been defeated. However, the incident had left its impression on me and I asked for the name of the Soviet fencer to be repeated to me: Onishenko. I would be on my guard.”11

  The other two Soviet fencers, Lednev and Mosolov, fought their bouts; then it was Onishenko’s turn, this time against Jim Fox, a top-class fencer, good enough to have been placed sixth in the British épée rankings and who had been watching Parker’s fight closely. “Adrian swore that Boris had not hit him,” Fox told me. “When I fenced him I jumped in, deliberately opening myself for a stop-hit. I was still outside hitting distance when I picked up Onishenko’s blade—really high, before his point was anywhere near me. His blade was above my head and I smacked it [my épée] into his chest—but the light was already on.” As soon as Fox challenged the touch, Onishenko said, “No, no, Jimmy, there was no hit. I will change the weapon.” Fox was adamant that he should not do so. Malacarne again: “As they fenced, I had a distinct feeling that Onishenko’s light came on at the mere contact of blades … and I immediately signaled that the hit was annulled. At that point I asked Onishenko to surrender his weapon to me.