A few months ago I wrote about reputation in fencing, about how every fencer is building one, whether they realize it or not, with every bout, every call, every small choice nobody is grading them on. Honesty is where that reputation is actually made or lost. Not the big, easy honesty of shaking hands after a loss. The small, inconvenient kind, the kind that costs you something the moment you choose it.

There are two versions of this conversation. Honesty of fencers, and honesty of coaches. They are not the same conversation, even though they rhyme.

Honesty of Fencers

Every epeeist knows the moment. The machine lights up in your favor and you know, you just know, that your point grazed the floor first, or your front foot was already off the strip. The referee didn’t see it. Your opponent isn’t sure. Nobody is going to check.

Except you know. And what you do in that second, whether you take the point and move on or you raise your hand and give it back, is not really about that touch. It’s about who you’re deciding to be, one touch at a time, for the rest of your career.

I’ve watched fencers at World Cups give up match point at 14-14 because they knew, with certainty only they had access to, that the touch wasn’t theirs. Nobody made them do it. Nobody would have known if they hadn’t. That’s the whole point. Honesty that only matters when someone’s watching isn’t honesty, it’s just good behavior in front of an audience.

And it runs both ways. If a call goes against you that you know, in your body, was wrong, that’s a moment for honesty too, just aimed differently. You don’t have to talk your opponent’s case for her. But you don’t get to manufacture outrage over a call you privately know was correct, either.

Honesty of Coaches

Here’s where it gets heavier, and I say this as someone who coaches from the strip-side, not the bleachers. A fencer’s dishonesty affects one bout, one reputation, one kid learning a lesson the hard way. A coach’s dishonesty teaches an entire generation of fencers what integrity is actually worth in our sport, and the lesson lands whether we mean to teach it or not.

Our fencers watch us far more closely than we usually give them credit for. Not just the technical corrections and the strategy between periods. They watch what we do when honesty costs us something. When honesty costs them a bout we’ve been building toward all season.

That’s not theoretical for me. It happened to me.

The Floor

At a regional competition a while back, I was coaching a girl in a round of 16. She was up three or four touches, comfortable, in control. Her opponent attacked, and my fencer answered with a wide parry 8 and a riposte. In that motion, her own blade grazed the floor a fraction of a second before her point found her opponent’s chest. The referee’s hand went up in her favor. Clean, ordinary moment, the kind that happens forty times a day and nobody thinks twice about it.

Except I saw the floor touch and the light lit. And before I’d decided anything, it was already out of my mouth. “Floor!”

Every head turned. Two fencers, the referee, and the other girl’s father, who was working the corner alone since she didn’t have a coach with her that day. I didn’t take it back. “She hit the floor in her parry before the point landed,” I said. Against my own fencer.

She was confused, then disappointed, in that order. She hadn’t felt the floor at all, hadn’t seen it, and now the touch she thought she’d just banked was gone. The next few exchanges went to her opponent. My fencer had to fight back to tie the score and win it on priority, which she did. She won the bout in the end.

But she didn’t want to talk to me afterward. And her mother, understandably upset, asked to see the video with me.

We watched it together. It was unambiguous. The tip dipped, hit the floor, lighting the machine, and bounced up into the chest a beat later. I’ll admit something here: watching that replay, before I knew what it would show, I was nervous in a way that had nothing to do with the bout itself. What if I’d been wrong? What if I’d cost my own fencer, in an important qualifier, a touch that should have counted, over a call only I claimed to see, against her?

The mother asked me, not unkindly but pointedly, why I’d volunteered it at all. Nobody else caught the floor. The referee hadn’t seen it. My fencer certainly wasn’t going to call it on herself. It wasn’t my call to make, and it definitely wasn’t in my fencer’s interest.

I’ve turned that question over more times than I can count since, and I keep landing in the same place. A touch my fencer didn’t actually score isn’t a touch she should keep, and it doesn’t matter whose favor it happened to fall in. If I’ll call the floor on an opponent’s touch, and I would, without hesitation, then I have to call it on my own fencer’s too, or the whole thing is just theater. My job is to not become the reason a fencer’s medal has an asterisk only I know about, whether that fencer is mine or someone else’s.

Would it have been simpler to stay quiet? Obviously. Nobody would have blamed me, least of all my own fencer. She’d have kept her lead, likely cruised to the win, and gone home happy, no video, no upset mother, no awkward car ride. But I’d have known, every time I looked at that medal, that I helped her win something she didn’t actually win, and that I’d taught her, without saying a word, that honesty is for other people’s mistakes, not your own.

Pay It Forward, or Pay for It Forward

I believe in one principle that I keep returning to, in fencing and everywhere else. You either pay it forward, or you pay for it forward. Every shortcut you take, every convenient silence, every touch you let slide because speaking up is awkward or costly, doesn’t disappear. It just moves down the road and waits for you, usually at a moment when you can least afford it.

That’s true for a fourteen year old deciding whether to call her own floor touch. It’s just as true for a coach deciding whether to open his mouth about someone else’s.

It’s always your choice how you build this. Bout by bout, call by call, season by season. Nobody is grading you on it in the moment. But the fencing world has a long memory, and it remembers exactly the things you thought nobody was watching.

So build it honestly. Both of you, fencer and coach. It’s the only version of winning that’s actually worth keeping.

Image: By thinkpublic free under the CC BY-ND 2.0 license