Inside the dank helmet, moist with breath and sweat, the sound of your own respiration is as audible as the sounds in the hall around you. Thus insulated, your world narrows until there is only you and your opponent and the yard-long steel blade you each possess. Final salutes given, you now adopt the traditional stance. Knees bent, lead leg to the fore, trailing arm behind with elbow bent at 90 degrees and open hand pointing casually at the ceiling, sword forward with wrist up, elbow bent close to your body, ready to strike.
Ready to kill.
The stiff steel mesh an inch in front of your eyes all but disappears as your focus zeroes through to your opponent, six feet away and just as ready to kill YOU. Not so tough. Keep your confidence or they'll know it and smell blood. Then you're dead. Take an easy breath - the last one for a while - and release it slowly. Focus now. Look at nothing in particular, the better to see everything...
"En guarde!"
An involuntary but welcome adrenaline surge doubles your heart-rate and halves your perception time. You're prepared for action and you can barely wait. The record shows that six matches out of seven, your opponent has been the first to strike - usually at the face. Always in the upper area. When they do, you'll deflect that and stab their torso with the same lunge. Should they deflect that strike, you know exactly how you'll set yourself up for the next one. What are they waiting for?
Damn. Fine! Advance. Advance. They also advance. You're within striking distance now. Your blades meet almost casually in several small, swirling feints, each of you trying to draw the other out. Watching… watching…
Their shoulder drops and you instinctively move to block the lunge that will invariably follow. Except that this time it doesn't. This time the true attack happens just as you've become off-balance and un-guarded. You FOOL! Your blade scrapes theirs and jabs ineffectually at the air while the tip of your opponent's blade, with their full weight and power behind it, slams into your mid section. Were this not a game, the contents of your spleen would now be fouling your shoes.
Ask Olympic hopeful and four-time women's collegiate fencing champion Natalie Vie why she chose a sport derived from mortal combat and her initial answer is deceptively superficial. "I was reading a book, and the main character worked on the fencing team and...that just put the idea in my head…"
What she doesn't say, although true, is that she and championship fencing were made for one another.
Natalie Julia Vie was born in Los Angeles and raised in Phoenix, the eldest of four children. She credits the family responsibilities she undertook after her parents divorced and her mom began full-time work with keeping her on the straight and narrow; but it doesn't seem to have slowed her down much. A confirmed polymath, she can alternately and credibly describe herself as a writer, sculptor, fencer and coach. Active in sports from first grade on, Natalie competed in three prior to college: Swimming, track and...cheerleading.
"I was really into competitive cheerleading my whole life growing up and I know that sounds dorky, but I loved performing and challenging myself and the physicality of it." Fun as it was, though, Natalie was increasingly drawn to the more individual sports in which she was also involved. "I'd done cheer since first grade and it's just part of my personality that I stuck with it… but it ended up not being as fun for me as the swim team or the track team… the individual sports."
All sports went on the back-burner during her senior year in high school, when Natalie focused on academics and her role as editor of the school newspaper. It was also when she read Catcher In The Rye and, even though its depiction in the novel is decidedly lackluster, became curious to know more about fencing. She looked up local fencing clubs and, along with a friend, checked one out.
"My friends thought it was hilarious! 'Fencing? Who's ever heard of fencing?!' but at the same time they were super curious." Still, Natalie doesn't think they were too surprised. "I don't think they expected anything less from me because they knew I kind of go with my passions, and if I get an idea I just go after it."
Fencing was the right thing at the right time for Natalie. "Graduating high school left a huge void, especially in time, before college started." She also found that it satisfied her in ways that her previous activities hadn't. "It involved a mental aspect that I'd never found in the other sports I'd done, with the physicality and the fact that it was an individual rather than a team sport...so it was the perfect combination for me."
Of the three weapons used in Olympic competition, Natalie competes with the eppe' - the heaviest and most rigid, and the one whose rules allow the most freedom of form.
Though she began fencing at a relatively late age for a future champ, Natalie realized she'd actually been in training for years. "The competitive cheer I did outside of school was closely tied to a gymnastics program...and through that I really learned about rhythm and dancing and mastering my own body in terms of coordination - all the physical things that fencing requires. So it's almost as if I'd been leading up to this my whole life. When I came to fencing, it just felt natural."
Another natural thing may help explain Natalie's success. One of her great uncles, Julio de Caro, is considered by many to have been a prime progenitor of modern Tango; and for Natalie, who enjoys Latin dance herself, the footwork which carries her comparatively slight frame into battle exhibits an apparently effortless facility. An example of this can be seen on YouTube.com, in a video of highlights from Natalie's title-winning Duel in the Desert bout this past January in Las Vegas. Her opponent, also a world-class fencer, always searches out a solid footing. Natalie, in contrast, seems to be continuously moving to an inner rhythm; pivoting her hips as she shifts her weight back and forth. Her steps are more frequent, more evenly measured and more fluid. The more intense the action, the more Natalie seems to be dancing.
According to Natalie, a fencer's style is as unique as her finger print. "Even if I didn't know who was out there, I could tell who they were as soon as they started fencing." This is why several seasons ago she began taking notes on every fencer she might be matched against. She noted their strengths and vulnerabilities, patterns of behavior, and individual peculiarities. Natalie knows she can only take this so far, though. "Obviously, you try to avoid their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. But you can't rely on it," she says, "because as soon as you do, then they do something totally unpredictable and you're not ready for it. More than that, the whole process of taking the notes helps me keep my focus the entire time while I'm waiting for a bout."
In the few short years since she began fencing, included four years on ASU's Salle Diablo Fencing Club, Natalie has earned bachelors degrees in both Political Science and Sculpture (graduating magna cum laude), and competed in fencing championships in five different countries, some multiple times.
Despite her relatively brief time at the sport, she has racked up an enviable ratio of wins, including four U.S. championship titles. In fact, her win/loss ratio suggests she would be evenly matched in the highest echelon of women fencers in the U.S., the top four of which will automatically earn a spot on the 2012 U.S. Olympic team.
If only it was that easy. Due to the way fencing rankings are calculated, (cumulatively and with the lowest three scores discarded) a dominant fencer's ranking will generally improve the more bouts they are able to compete in. In countries which sponsor their athletes, this isn't a problem, and rankings are likely to have a direct correlation to raw talent. U.S. fencers, on the other hand, must pay their own way to every event. Here, talent is necessary for a high ranking, but not sufficient. A fencer also needs funds.
Natalie has a job coaching up-and-coming athletes at Phoenix Falcons fencing club, which is one of the few employers able to understand and work with her unique scheduling requirements. Up until final Olympians are selected in April of 2012, she will have the opportunity to travel to as many as twelve competition per year worldwide. That's a lot of time off, and a lot of airfare, lodging and fees to pay for.
And of course Natalie's not alone. The roster of U.S. fencers tends to be younger than their international counterparts - a competitive disadvantage in a sport where experience is an asset - due to the fact that there is no living to be made from it. Also, unlike many other countries, the U.S. does not subsidize their Olympic athletes. "We have an incredibly young team...once you leave college there's no support system. It's sad, but that's the truth."
That's not to say that U.S. fencers aren't competitive, all things being equal. Far from it. In fact, in the last two olympics, of the six medalists in the sabre category, FIVE were Americans. What leveled the playing field somewhat for sabre was that it was a new olympic adoption, and so all of the competitors were new to the sport on the Olympic level. The oldest forms of Olympic fencing, which use either the epee' of foil, however, are still dominated by Europeans.
French fencers are rock stars in their home country, where champs can be certain not only of sponsorship, but also career-spanning endorsement deals, paid guest spots and the like. In many ways the sport perpetuates itself through personality in Europe much the way that U.S. basketball does here, where the public is always looking to the next Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, etc.
"If you think of any popular sport, one of the biggest factors is the individual athletes and whether you care about their story or not," Natalie reflects, "and so I think if we start to put our athletes forward that will only be good for U.S. fencing."
There is a long way to go before the sport gets mainstream recognition here (and pro soccer looms as a prescient example of the difficulty of an internationally adored sport to usurp any of the attention we give to the big 5 of baseball, basketball, football, golf and NASCAR); but if anyone can turn some heads to it, it's probably Natalie Vie. She has not only the captivating mix of sex appeal, athleticism and ambition necessary to gain attention, but also the intellect and grounding to maintain it.
Would SHE like to become the popular figurehead of U.S. fencing? "I have a lot of support here in Phoenix and a lot excitement from people at my club and I love it when some of the kids at the club look up to me, but... the most important thing to me is that I get my tournaments paid for. I'm not looking to get famous - I want to be an international player and get as good as I can get."
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