The Fencing World Championships just started on July 22nd and will run through Sunday the 30th in Milan, Italy. This is a major international fencing event that happens every year as the culmination of the season, except during the Olympics, where the Games serve the same purpose.
All three weapons and both women and men participate in the competition, in team and individual events. It’s a smorgasbord of world-class fencing, the closest thing to the Olympics outside of the Games themselves, and definitely something fencers want to keep an eye out for. Especially this year, the World Championships are an essential part of the run-up to next year’s Paris Olympiad.
Let’s delve into the format of the championship, the significance of team events in Olympic qualification, and the software used to manage this incredible and incredibly important competition.
Individual Events – Preliminaries and Eliminations
The individual events are the heart of the championship, spanning the first six days of the tournament.
During each day of competition, there’s a great mix of gender and weapon. This mix theoretically allows people from countries that don’t have a lot of fencers to participate in several events (for example, the same fencer can participate one day in the Women’s Foil event and another day in the Women’s Sabre event). On one single day, there will be a women’s individual round from one weapon and then a men’s individual from another weapon, and then the same kind of pattern for the team competition. It’s always interchanged.
Each individual competition at the Fencing World Championship is divided into two phases over two days. The first day consists of the preliminary round, establishing the final top 64 table. Then, a few days later, the competition moves on to the second stage, which is fencing the final table of 64, where the world champion will be determined.
