I recently stumbled upon a quote from Winston Churchill that stopped me in my tracks: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” These words resonated deeply with me, not just as a life philosophy, but as the perfect encapsulation of what it truly means to succeed in fencing.

We often think about success in fencing as something tangible: that coveted rating, qualifying for Summer Nationals, making the podium at JOs, securing a spot on a college team. We chase these markers relentlessly, as if collecting them will somehow validate our worth as fencers or coaches or parents.

But what if we’ve been defining success all wrong?

The Inevitable Path of Failure

Let’s be honest about the reality of competitive fencing: it’s a sport designed to produce far more “failures” than successes. In a tournament of 150 fencers, 149 will end their day with a loss. The path to any significant achievement in fencing is paved with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of defeats.

I’ve watched countless promising fencers quit after:

• Failing to advance from pools in their first national competition
• Missing qualification for JOs by a single place
• Losing a critical DE bout after leading 14-10
• Not making the college team they’d dreamed about for years
• Receiving a lower rating than expected after a full season of training

Each of these moments represents a crossroads. The fencer who views these setbacks as definitive statements about their potential typically walks away. The fencer who sees them as necessary steps in a longer journey typically goes on to fulfill much more of their potential.

Churchill’s wisdom cuts straight to the heart of this distinction. Success isn’t about never failing—it’s about maintaining your enthusiasm through the inevitable failures.

The Character-Building Machine

What makes Churchill’s definition so brilliant for fencers is that it reframes success as something entirely within our control. You can’t control whether you’ll win a specific bout or earn a particular rating, even when you feel certain of victory. But you can absolutely control whether you maintain your enthusiasm after a disappointing result.

This enthusiasm isn’t about putting on a fake smile after a crushing defeat. It’s about preserving your genuine love for the process, your curiosity about improvement, and your willingness to step back onto the strip with renewed determination.

If you have a devastating early elimination at a NAC after strong pools, it’s totally ok to feel crushed. This feeling is a natural reaction. You can even have this lingering feeling for a while. But if after that you analyze your mistakes and together with your coach create a plan to work towards the future competitions and start working with the same or even higher vigor, that’s the enthusiasm I mean. 

The result hadn’t changed, but your relationship to it had. You had transformed failure into a catalyst rather than an endpoint. This is the moment when Churchill’s definition of success embodied perfectly.

The Many Faces of Fencing Failure

Failure in fencing comes in many forms, and each offers its own opportunity for growth if approached with the right mindset:

Competitive Failures: These are the most obvious—losses in competition, especially those that sting the most. The bout you “should have” won. The opponent you’ve beaten before but lost to when it counted. The competition where you finished lower than your seeding.

Many fencers experience these moments and immediately begin questioning their training, their coach, or their potential. But the successful fencer—in Churchill’s definition—experiences the same disappointment but maintains enthusiasm for the journey. They analyze rather than catastrophize, they adjust rather than abandon.

I’ve seen fencers lose preliminary bouts so badly that referees offered sympathetic looks, only to adapt their approach and surge through the direct elimination tableau. The difference wasn’t in their technical ability between rounds—it was in their ability to maintain enthusiasm and belief.

Technical Failures: Hours spent practicing a particular action that still fails under pressure. The attack that worked perfectly in lessons but collapses in competition. The defensive move that leaves you vulnerable exactly when you need it most.

The natural response is frustration—to abandon the action or revert to comfortable habits. But technical mastery in fencing requires persistence through these failures. The champions will attempt a new technique twenty, fifty, a hundred times in competition before it becomes reliable. They miss touches, lose points, sometimes even lose bouts and entire competitions—but they maintain enthusiasm for the developmental process.

Rating Failures: Not achieving that C you’ve been working toward all season. Watching others with less experience earn ratings before you. Feeling stuck at the same level despite consistent effort.

These moments test a fencer’s enthusiasm more than almost anything else. But ratings are merely wayposts on a longer journey, not destinations in themselves. The fencers who eventually break through are those who can say, “Not yet,” rather than “Not ever.”

Selection Failures: Not making the team. Not qualifying for that important event in the national championship. Not being admitted to the college of your dreams.

These failures cut deeply because they feel like institutional judgments of our worth. But I’ve watched fencers use these moments to completely reinvent their approach, often returning stronger than those who were selected.

The Mental Game of Persistent Enthusiasm

Maintaining enthusiasm through failure isn’t a passive quality—it’s an active skill that can be developed. Here are approaches I’ve seen work with fencers:

1. Redefine the timeline: When fencers face a brutal competition season with results consistently below their capabilities, reframing the timeline can be transformative. By drawing out a longer development plan that positions these failures as necessary data points in a multi-year journey rather than definitive statements about potential, the entire perspective shifts. This approach helps fencers see setbacks as valuable information rather than terminal judgments, which can reignite enthusiasm almost immediately.

2. Create process victories: Work with your coach to identify small, achievable victories that exist independent of competition results. Successfully executing a specific action three times in a competition, regardless of outcome. Maintaining tactical discipline throughout a pool. These process victories provide enthusiasm-sustaining successes even amidst competitive failures.

3. Study the failure patterns of champions: Show me a fencing champion, and I’ll show you someone who has experienced devastating failures. Look at the Tokyo Olympic Champion Irina Embrich who missed qualification for the previous 4 (!) Games. Study the early competition records of world champions. These patterns normalize failure as part of the journey rather than evidence that the journey should end.

4. Build a failure-positive community: Surround yourself with teammates and coaches who normalize talking about failures, who don’t treat losses as shameful secrets, who can laugh about their own mistakes while still taking improvement seriously. The ability to maintain enthusiasm is contagious—and so is its opposite.

The Parent’s Role in Enthusiasm Preservation

Parents, your response to your fencer’s failures may be the single biggest factor in whether they develop this Churchill-esque definition of success.

I’ve watched well-meaning parents inadvertently extinguish their child’s enthusiasm after failures through:

• Overanalyzing the loss on the car ride home
• Suggesting tactical adjustments too soon after an emotional defeat
• Focusing exclusively on outcome rather than process
• Comparing results to those of teammates or rivals
• Expressing disappointment, however subtly, in ways children can sense acutely

Instead, the most effective parents I’ve observed:

• Create space for natural disappointment without trying to immediately “fix” the feeling
• Ask questions rather than offer solutions: “What did you learn?” rather than “You should have done this”. Or even better, don’t ask any questions but instead say something like “I’m sure you tried your best and if something didn’t work as you expected, I trust in you to be able to work on it.”
• Share stories of their own failures and recoveries, including from other areas of life
• Explicitly separate their love and approval from competitive outcomes
• Model enthusiasm persistence in their own lives

This doesn’t mean artificially celebrating losses or pretending disappointment doesn’t exist. It means showing your fencer that enthusiasm can coexist with disappointment—that one need not extinguish the other. But also disappointment can be different – think about these two expressions: “I’m disappointed in how badly you fenced,” and “I’m sure you are disappointed with your result, I feel it and I’m unhappy for you too, but I know you tried to win and am sure you’ll learn from it.”

The Coach’s Responsibility

As coaches, we must take seriously our role in either fostering or undermining this Churchill definition of success. We do this by:

• Celebrating resilience as loudly as we celebrate victories
• Sharing our own stories of failure and persistence
• Creating training environments where risk-taking and failure are normalized
• Helping fencers contextualize losses within longer developmental arcs
• Being enthusiastic about the process ourselves, especially when results disappoint

Most importantly, we must resist the temptation to measure our own success solely by our fencers’ competitive achievements. A coach who deflates after their fencer’s losses inadvertently teaches that enthusiasm contingent on results is the only kind that exists.

The Ultimate Fencing Success

If we accept Churchill’s definition, then success in fencing isn’t about accumulating victories—it’s about cultivating an enthusiasm that persists through defeat. It’s about the fencer who loses in the first DE round but shows up Monday ready to work. It’s about the fencer who fails to qualify this year but immediately begins preparing for next season. It’s about the fencer who never reaches their competitive dreams but discovers a lifelong love for the sport that enriches them for decades.

These fencers may not always take home the medals, but they experience something perhaps more valuable: the knowledge that their enthusiasm and determination can’t be broken by external circumstances. They develop resilience that serves them far beyond the strip, into careers, relationships, and life challenges where this exact quality—persistence through failure—determines so much of what we achieve.

Is there a more valuable success we could hope for?

The next time you or your fencer faces a disappointing result, remember Churchill’s words. Success isn’t about avoiding the failures—it’s about maintaining your enthusiasm as you move through them, one touch, one bout, one tournament at a time.

Because in fencing, as in life, the only true failure is allowing temporary defeats to permanently diminish your enthusiasm for the journey.

Image: by Pixnio Under Public Domain free usage