So maybe my next job isn’t fencing correspondent

I’ll admit that I’m not a professional sports journalist, but I like to think of myself as a decent amateur watcher of sport.

As an American living in London, I’ve even fallen deeply in love with cricket. Fencing, however, foxes me completely.

It all sounds so marvellous:

“Take the romantic, swashbuckling epics of Errol Flynn, add some rules, protective clothing and an electronic scoring system, and you have fencing at the Olympic Games. Two rivals stand opposite each other and feint, lunge, parry and riposte until one scores the required number of hits to win”  — so says the official Beijing Olympics website.

The photographs are even more alluring to me. White-suited warriors stand out sharply from pitch-black backgrounds; metal swords gleam; alien-looking bodies are captured in a state of grace.

In person, the venue oozes with romance — hall lights off, the heavy humid air envelopes all. The fencers emerge, swaddled from top to bottom in electrified suits designed to record every hit. They put on their masks. The referee, wearing a powder-blue jacket, puts them en garde and we get three minutes of violent dance-like movements: thrust, parry, fleche, reprise, riposte and goodness knows what else.

On contact, the electronic lights flash, the contestants let off wild almost inhuman screams, and the referee glances at a slow-motion replay before contorting his body into a an arcane gesture indicating analysis and scoring.

I must admit, on almost every single contact I witnessed I couldn’t figure out who should have been awarded the point — and when I guessed the referee was invariably of an opposite view.

After a while, baffled and confused — but still entranced by the beauty — I left, knowing that at least one more career route is now closed off to me.

Photo: Giovanna Trillini of Italy (L) competes against Nam Hyunhee of South Korea during their women’s individual foil fencing semi-finals at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, August 11, 2008. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini

When I joined a fencing club in June, I just wanted to learn about a sport I would cover for the
first time at the Beijing Games. Then a grandmother thrashed me in my first bout, bruising more than just my ego.

I used to fool around with a plastic sword as a kid, pretending I was d’Artagnan, so I figured I was well primed for a promising amateur career in this low-profile sport.

My first disappointment at the fencing club in Hellerup, a suburb of Copenhagen, was not being allowed to try the sabre — seen by some as cooler than the other two weapons, epee and foil, because it is derived from the cavalry sword and allows slashing hits as well as thrusts.

My coach, Mads Eriksen, said that weapon was too complex for a novice, so I was assigned the epee, where the rules are easy: just poke any part of the opponent’s body and you score a point.

Of course, it’s important that your epee be the same length as your adversary’s. Apparently I had not considered this when I unwittingly selected a weapon meant for 12-year olds.

At least the sight of me ‘en garde’ with a stunted epee gave everyone in the room a reason to start the training session with a good laugh.

I continued to provide humour material when I promptly lost my first match to a grandmother. Granted, Sara is a young grandmother, but her daughter has a daughter, so there was no denying it: I lost to a grandmother, and badly.

Sara said the 15-10 thrashing had been her first win in months at the club. Her epee also gave me the first of many bruises that were to pepper the right side of my body during my time at the club.

I never managed to win a match in my short tenure there but at least it’s given me real appreciation for the skill of the fencers I’m watching here.