Why Does the USA Dominate Youth Fencing?

This was a historic moment, not just for walls, but for fencing also. Traditionally, fencing was dominated by a handful of Western European countries like France and Italy, and then the Eastern Bloc countries like the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and even Cuba. The USA was kind of irrelevant almost in fencing until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, which resulted in many of the top fencers moving west. The USA went from having a fairly amateur fencing culture to having a whole host of some of the most professional and skilled fencers and fencing coaches in the world. One such coach was Adam Skarbonkiewicz, who I will talk about a little bit later on in the video. But fast forward to 2026, and the USA has topped the medal table at the last five Cadet and Junior World Championships. But the question is, will this dominance continue, and will it translate into success at the senior level? Obviously, I'm not American. I don't have so much firsthand experience of this, but if you are and you have stuff to contribute, drop some comments, please. The big driver of fencing in the USA is the college system. In Europe, if you go on a website of any fencing club, they boast about the medals they've won for different international selections. If you go on a website of an American fencing club, what they boast about is completely different. What they boast about is how many fencers get into top colleges, Harvard, Princeton, whatever. Getting accepted into a top college is really difficult. You're competing with a lot of people, not just from the USA, but around the world. But if you get recruited as an athlete, you don't necessarily need to have the best academic grades. Fencing is a bit more of a niche sport, so a lot of parents put their kids into fencing thinking it will be a bit less competitive and it will be an easier route into college compared to, I don't know, athletics. Then there are these scholarships that can potentially save you thousands of dollars. College in America is expensive. So basically, there are a lot of incentives there for fencers at a young age to focus on fencing. The college system has also built and maintained a lot of really good sporting infrastructure, especially in fencing. They've got some top-level fencing styles, equipment, et cetera, and it brings in some of the best coaches in the world, basically. It's kind of a point where you'd argue that the US college circuit is probably the strongest domestic competitive circuit there is in the world, I'd say. And if you happen to be a young fencer looking to get into a top American college, then this video sponsor might be of interest to you. The Scholars Edge is a new program up in Portland, Oregon, which is a collaboration between the Oregon Fencing Alliance and the Oregon Episcopal School. It is headed by Adam Skarbonkiewicz, a really good coach who originally is from Poland, but he's been well-established in the USA for a long time now. You might recognize the name from his daughter, Magda, who has featured quite a lot on this channel in the past. She is a really incredible fencer. She competed at the Paris Olympics in 2024. She's currently at Notre Dame, and she's done some pretty wild things on the piste. Oregon Fencing Alliance has produced some really top fencers before, particularly Mariel Zagunis. She's an Olympic champion. She's won pretty much everything there is to win in women's sabre. So yeah, there's a lot of prestige there. And basically what they are offering is a top-level fencing program whilst you're at an American independent boarding school. So the idea is you can really focus on your fencing, but without compromising your academic life, your school life. You're not having to travel miles and miles to get to your fencing club and back. You know, a lot of people I know spend hours in the car every week just getting to the club and back. No, you're fencing at the school. You know, you come straight from your school to your fencing club. It sounds pretty ideal to me. The school is all about kind of building this supportive community experience, which is really what you need as an athlete. I know that the demands are quite particular. So to me, it sounds pretty ideal for a young fencer who's really looking to take it to another level. If you want to read more about the Fences Edge, I've put a link down in the description. Go check it out. American youth fencing competitions are huge. It's not unusual to have like 14 events with over 200, nearly 300 fencers. That's bigger than plenty of World Cups. So with a huge talent pool, it's kind of inevitable that the cream will rise to the top and that you'll get some top fencers emerging and that those fencers will be really well prepared for big international competitions. There's kind of a special particular mental and physical endurance you need in order to make deep runs into big competitions. And you kind of need experience at these big competitions to get there. If you're from a, you know, you might be from a country which has a lot of strength in saber fencing, for example. But if the numbers aren't there, you still don't get that same experience of having to grind through, you know, match after match. You could have a country with eight of the best fencers in the world. You still don't get the same competition experience if you're only doing, you know, a 32 through to a final, as opposed to, you know, a 128, a 256 through to a final. So yeah, I'd argue that the American competitions really give great preparation for big international competitions. But I would also argue that the main reason for the success of the USA in fencing is really just down to economics. Something that I don't think we really appreciate, at least here in Europe, is that the USA is kind of the richest country in the world. Now, you can define rich in all sorts of ways. You could look at GDP per capita, and from there, the USA isn't even top. You could look at life expectancy, and in that one, the USA is actually quite far down the list. But if you just look at the raw number of rich people, USA just dominates, it's just head and shoulders above everyone else. And I think this is really the metric that matters the most in fencing. There are American parents who can't afford to spend, you know, six figures a year on their children's fencing, covering all the competition costs, the training costs, the equipment, the medical costs if you get injured. All of these expenses can be quite a huge barrier to the average people, but USA just has more people who are, you know, above that average. And fencing in the USA is kind of expensive. In European countries where the sport might be subsidized by, you know, the national governments or just, you know, the local municipality, the sport can be kind of made quite affordable. If we take a look at this club, Daum, which has produced some of the top French fencers over the last couple of decades, Olympic medalists, the most you might pay in membership fees for a season is like 330 euros. Now, take a look at how much you might pay every month at this American youth program. Now, you might think that this kind of, you know, cost is a bad thing for fencing for a country because it makes it unaffordable to lots of people. You're locking out a lot of the fencing talent. And I'm sure it does. I'm sure it does make fencing inaccessible to a lot of people in the USA. But there are still enough people who can afford to pay these prices. And what that does is it makes fencing coaching and running a fencing club relatively lucrative compared to other countries. And in turn, what that does is it attracts the top fencers from around the world to come to the USA because if you can get a job in an American club and at the same time, you know, in the morning, you could be working at a college club, then you can be doing quite well for yourself as a fencing coach. Now, maybe in the more established fencing countries or countries with, you know, long hundreds of years of fencing tradition, they might have infrastructures to preserve and develop fencing knowledge, fencing, you know, education, coach education to develop coaches. The USA doesn't need to do that. They can just bring in all the best fencers from around the world. And it also kind of gives a little bit of a diversity because they're not just, you know, there's not just one, you know, American fencing school. No, they will get fencers from Italy, from France, from Russia, from Poland, from Korea. Literally everywhere, they will come to America and it kind of creates this, it's kind of cliche, but kind of a melting pot of the fencing cultures. But the big question is, will this success at the youth level translate into success at the senior level? Well, for the most part, it kind of already has. The USA is already one of the top dogs in senior international fencing. They finished second in the medal table at the 2024 Olympics, and second again in the medal table at the 2025 World Championships. But I think the difference is that at the senior level, I don't think the USA is likely to dominate quite so consistently as they do at the youth level. There are a couple of issues I think that start to emerge as American fencers start to get older, as they start to age into seniors. As I said, most of the young American fencers, they end up going into the American college system. Obviously, this is great because they get access to top training facilities, top fencers, sparring partners. On paper, it's pretty perfect. But it is also, from what I hear from everyone, it's also pretty brutal in that you've got to balance at the same time your university, your academic stuff with all of your college fencing demands. Then you have your domestic fencing competitions. Some colleges might want you to still be competing on the domestic circuit, the North American Cups. At the same time, you might still be doing junior World Cups, competing internationally at the junior level. You might also, at the same time, be trying to compete at the senior level at FIU World Cups. So it can be really hard work, and this can lead to a lot of fencers basically burning out. So what we get is this huge drop-off from fencers after they finish college. And if you look at the average fencing competition in America, you see this huge gap between the ages of like 25 and 40 where there aren't really many fencers in that age bracket. And that is kind of, that's the age bracket where you are meant to be the most performant. That's where you peak as a fencer normally. After graduating, there's another big barrier which I think fencers suddenly hit, and that is about funding. In a lot of the top fencing countries, the fencers get some sort of support from the national government. Normally via like the military, they might be soldiers on paper, they might be police, they might have some sort of civil service position, which basically means they do a bit of PR work, but they are paid to fence, and they might also get access to a national training center with all of the facilities it offers, the coaches, the physios, all that. The USA doesn't really have any of this. Fencers are kind of left to fend for themselves. Now there are fencers who manage to succeed outside of these structures. They might be able to get personal sponsorships, they might be able to build up their own brand in order to support themselves. They might even be able to maintain their fencing career while still having a full-time job. But it's kind of hard. And we also, I think, start to see a bit of an issue, maybe a cultural issue with the demographics of where fencers are drawn from initially. If you've just graduated a top college, and all your social circle, your friends, your family who have gone through a similar thing to you, they're all starting to go off, get jobs, becoming lawyers, doctors, et cetera, financial advisors, making good money, starting a family, buying property, and you're there still trying to grind the fencing, not really earning anything from it. You kind of get socially incentivized to do what everyone else is doing. If that's the social circle you're living around, you'll kind of be more likely to think, okay, I'm gonna get a real job, a sensible job, like everyone else in my life is doing. Now, maybe if you're from a wealthy enough background, you don't actually need to work. Maybe your parents can actually afford to support you as a fencer throughout your 20s, even 30s. But there's still this social pressure. I don't think many people want to be dependent like that. And I think if you compare to someone, I don't know if you grew up in Guadeloupe or Sicily, and your parents were teachers or whatever, then you can probably earn as much as your parents, you might be able to earn as much as your parents from fencing as they were doing in their job. It kind of suddenly makes sense to do fencing more. It's not like a step down or a step back, or it becomes a step forwards. And you're probably gonna be a little bit more hungry for success in fencing. But in the USA, these kind of hungrier demographics are completely excluded very early on. Basically, if you've made it this far in fencing, where it's an option to be a top international fencer, you'll probably have more sensible options available to you. Because in the USA, so many fencers drop out when they hit like 24, it means there's this kind of continuous churn of fencers from even year to year. So if you're looking at like a team situation, the team might change completely from one year to the next. Now, compare this to a team like Hungary or Korea, they might have pretty much the same three, four, five fencers for literally like 10 years almost. So they build like a consistency, maybe they build a rapport between the fencers. And since they are likely to train together in like a national training center, then I think they build more of a team dynamic. Whereas in the USA, it's kind of all individually based. And for Olympic qualification at least, the team is super important. I think we start to see these issues with American fencing, particularly when we look at the epee. Men's epee, particularly team epee, has kind of been the weakness of USA fencing for quite a while now. And I think there's something slightly different about men's epee compared to foil and saber in that you can be competitive for a longer amount of time, you can win medals at the Olympics in your early 40s even. So you kind of, you get these fencers internationally who might take a long time to get to that top level. Whereas in the USA, I think they often, they might quit before they get a chance to get to that level. You also have kind of this peculiarity in men's team epee, where there's kind of a lot of strategy over how you play the bouts. In saber, you just have to get 45 points. In epee, you have to know when are we gonna push, when are we gonna play the passivity, are we gonna be attacking, are we gonna be defending? There's a bit more team tactics going on. And so I think you need a bit more team coherence that I think historically the USA has kind of struggled with. I think it's interesting if you compare France with the USA right now. France are really struggling in their epee at the minute. And in terms of like individual results, the USA are actually doing better than France probably. But in team events, France are still up there at the top. So I think maybe this points towards the advantage of having a centralized system in team epee at least. Having said that, the USA is still and has been for a while pretty strong in women's epee and women's team epee. And the men's epee team have seemed to have turned the corner as well. So it's not like it's a huge weakness epee for USA fencing. They're still pretty good. So yeah, overall, the USA is still one of the top nations in senior fencing and almost certainly will be for their conceivable future. But I think the advantages that they have at the youth level don't really hold out so far to the senior level. Obviously, as I said, I'm not American. I don't have the same experience of American fencing system. So I'd be really interested to hear what you yanks have to say in the comments. If you have anything to add, if I'm completely wrong on anything. Yeah, please let me know. Thanks for watching. Cheers guys. See you next time.