In one of the regional competitions, one of our girls told me – “I would feel embarrassed if I didn’t succeed and lose the bouts. It will be especially big embarrassment if I lose to somebody weaker than me.”
These words stopped me in my tracks. Not because they were surprising – they weren’t. But because they captured something so fundamentally true about our relationship with fencing, with competition, and with ourselves. Something we rarely talk about openly. This girl had already qualified for the national championship, there were no stakes for for her in this competition. A perfect place to fail.
Let’s be honest – we’ve all been there. Standing on the strip during a competition, knowing we should try that new action we’ve been practicing. The technical part is solid. The timing makes sense. The opportunity is perfect. And yet… we hesitate. We fall back on our trusted old movements, the ones we’ve done thousands of times before. Because they’re safe. Because they work. Because failing with them somehow feels less personal than failing with something new.
The irony doesn’t escape me. We’re at a regional competition where the results don’t affect her qualification for nationals. The perfect time to take risks, to expand her repertoire, to grow. And still, that voice in her head whispers: “But what if I mess up? What if people see? What if they remember?”
I want to talk about this fear. Not the general competition anxiety we all know too well, but this specific, nagging fear of embarrassment that comes with trying something new. It’s different from the nervous energy before a big bout or the pressure of a crucial DE. This fear is more intimate, more personal. It’s about our image – both in others’ eyes and, perhaps more importantly, in our own.
When we say we’re afraid of losing to “somebody weaker,” what we’re really saying is that we’re afraid of shattering an image we’ve carefully constructed. An image of competence, of skill, of being “better than that.” We’ve built this identity around our fencing abilities, and trying something new feels like putting that identity at risk.
But here’s what I’ve learned through years of my life: that identity is both more fragile and more resilient than we think. More fragile because it’s built on an impossible standard – never failing, never looking foolish, never losing to the “wrong” person. More resilient because, paradoxically, it becomes stronger every time we dare to risk it, because no one really contemplates that deeply about this identity of yours, no one really cares about it but yourself.
Think about the fencers you admire most. The ones whose actions seem effortless, whose tactical choices seem perfect. Do you really believe they got there without failing? Without having moments where they looked less than graceful? Without losing bouts they “should have” won while trying something new? Think about all these Olympic and World Champions who lost “absolutely their” bouts in the first round of the T64 – to a fencer who barely made it to the second day.
Every single action in our fencing repertoire – even the ones we’re most confident in now – started as something uncertain. Something that could have gone wrong. Something that probably did go wrong, many times, before it became reliable. The only difference between those actions and the new ones we’re afraid to try is that we’ve forgotten what it felt like to be uncertain about the old ones.
The truth is, there’s no such thing as risk-free growth in fencing. Every new technique, every tactical variation, every adaptation to our game comes with the possibility of failure. And yes, sometimes that failure will be public. Sometimes it will be against opponents we’re “supposed to” beat. Sometimes it will make us feel less than competent.
But here’s another truth: those moments of vulnerability, as uncomfortable as they are, are also moments of choice. We can choose to let them reinforce our fears, make us retreat further into our comfort zone. Or we can choose to see them as what they really are – evidence that we’re pushing our boundaries, that we’re still growing, still learning, still evolving as fencers.
That regional competition where we’ve already qualified for nationals? It’s not just a tournament with low stakes. It’s an opportunity to practice something even more important than new fencing actions – the ability to put our ego aside in service of our growth. To remember that looking good is less important than getting better. To understand that temporary embarrassment is a small price to pay for long-term improvement.
Because at the end of the day, the real embarrassment isn’t in trying something new and failing. It’s in letting our fear of embarrassment keep us from becoming the fencers we could be. It’s in reaching the end of a season and realizing we’re essentially the same fencer we were at the beginning, not because we couldn’t improve, but because we were too afraid to risk looking imperfect while trying.
So next time you’re in that moment – when you know you should try that new action, when the opportunity is perfect, when everything is lined up except your courage – remember this: The path to becoming the fencer you want to be runs straight through these moments of vulnerability. You can avoid the embarrassment of failure by never trying anything new. But in doing so, you’ll guarantee the regret of never knowing what you could have achieved if you’d been brave enough to risk looking foolish in service of getting better.
The choice, as always in both fencing and life, is yours to make.
Image: Michael, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” — Yoda