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A Sport UnmaskedPastime of the nobility or dirty little secret of the Games? The image of fencing is nothing like its reality
by Michael Farber
When the oldest Olympian on the U.S. team walked to her fencing strip
early Sunday morning in the Georgia World Congress Center, she should
have been hailed as an American heroine, a living monument to
determination. Instead, 50-year-old Elaine Cheris found herself at the
center of a murky story about an alleged bribe, a tale that has pitted
American versus American in a hissing contest involving lawyers, swords
and money.
Cheris (right) was ousted from individual competition by Chiesa, but the
controversy surrounding a match she won in March persisted.
photograph by
In March the U.S. Fencing Association (USFA) received allegations that a
young Ukrainian fencer was offered $500 to throw a World Cup bout
against Cheris earlier that month. "That's absolutely ridiculous,"
Cheris said Sunday. "That is a total fabrication." And although the USFA
looked into the allegations and also dismissed them, several U.S.
coaches and athletes remain unconvinced.
Fencing, which has been part of the Olympics since the modern Games
began 100 years ago, projects an aristocratic image: It likes to be seen
as a contest of courtly gentlemen (and gentlewomen) wielding swords to
defend their honor. But the reality of elite-level fencing, according to
numerous athletes, coaches and officials, is far less noble. Beneath the
surface lies a world rife with fixed bouts and traded favors, a bazaar
in which, if you know where to look, you can find a bargain.
"World Cup bouts are for sale, and an unscrupulous few go that route,"
says Don Lane, elite coordinator of the Canadian Fencing Federation.
"Fencers have shopped for a match: 'Who wants to beat me?' That money
will allow a fencer to buy equipment or go to a few more meets."
"Think about the most dishonest sport you know," says Paul Soter, the
U.S. women's épée coach. "Boxing? Boxing and fencing is not an unfair
analogy. The best fencing in the world is in a half dozen European
countries. It's their game. They cut their own deals, conduct themselves
the way 'gentlemen's' clubs did. They divvy up the spoils in their sport
as the robber barons of the late 19th century divvied up their
industries. It's amazing not that the thuggery goes on, but that people
come up who aren't corrupted."
Lev Rossochik, deputy managing editor of the Russian sports newspaper
Sport Ekspress, would agree with that assessment. "For as long as I have
known, throwing of bouts has been going on in fencing," says Rossochik,
who has covered the sport for 30 years. "But it never involved money, at
least not in the old days. It was understood by competitors. Let's say I
am a Russian fencer and you are a French fencer. If the European
championships are in Paris, I lose to you. Then the next year when the
world championships are in Moscow and it is a crucial match for me, you
lose to me. That's the way it was."
"Every sport," says Carl Schwende, a member of the executive board of
the International Fencing Federation (FIE), "has its dark corners." In
fencing the chicanery hasn't been restricted to major meets and
powerhouse matchups. In 1991 Canadian fencer Maureen Griffin says she
was approached at one of the final selection tournaments for the world
championships and told that if she threw a bout, her meet expenses would
be covered. Considering the costs of training, equipment, coaching and
travel, a fencer might spend $25,000 a year to make a world championship
or Olympic team. An athlete might feel that spending a few hundred
dollars to bribe an opponent could protect a considerable investment.
Rule changes in 1993—when FIE axed round-robin pools and loser's
brackets from tournament formats in favor of single elimination—were
designed to remove the quid pro quos in the sport and thus cut down on
cheating. While most athletes and coaches in the fencing community agree
that the new rules have helped, one 10-year World Cup veteran fencer
suggests dirty tricks still occur at every World Cup meet in an Olympic
year. Renata Grodecka, a Polish-born Canadian fencer, says that five
minutes before a bout in Europe this spring she was approached and asked
if she would sell a bout. "I was so shocked I didn't even ask the
price," says Grodecka, who didn't qualify for Atlanta. "Pity. I would
have been curious to know what these things cost now." When asked why
she didn't report the offer (deal making is supposed to lead to
expulsion from a meet) Grodecka says, "There was no proof. No one else
heard it."
Grodecka knew what the going rate for a dirty bout was in 1990—1,000
German marks ($515)—or at least that is what Grodecka says a friend told
her she was offered at a meet in Tauberbischofsheim, in what was then
West Germany. Grodecka, then fencing for Poland, says that she was also
approached about the same time, also in Tauberbischofsheim, by a coach
wanting to buy a bout for his fencer; she says she declined—and again
never spoke to authorities about the offer.
Then there is the sticky matter of the Cheris allegations. On March 17,
Cheris defeated 18-year-old Anna Garina of Ukraine 15-11 in the round of
64 at Tauberbischofsheim. (Fencers who reach the round of 32 earn World
Cup points, part of the USFA formula for selecting Olympians.) The
result was only a minor upset—Cheris beat Garina again seven weeks later
in Budapest—but the desultory manner in which Garina fenced early in the
bout raised at least a few eyebrows. According to one U.S. coach, a
German coach approached him and, implying that the bout appeared to have
been fixed, asked, "Why do you want Elaine on your team?" Garina has
said she fenced poorly because she was upset by the bribe attempt.
The gossip swirled through the fencing hall. Olga Cherniak, a
Ukrainian-born U.S. fencer, says some Ukrainian fencers told her that
Garina had been asked to go into the tank. Later, No. 1 American épée
fencer Leslie Marx, using Cherniak as a translator, asked Garina for her
story. Marx says Garina pointed out a man who she said offered her money
to throw the bout. The man was later identified as Gabriel Nielaba, a
Polish coach whom Cheris's personal coach, Janusz Peciak, acknowledges
as a friend but with whom he disavows any association in connection with
this allegation. In a letter to the USFA, Nielaba denied having ever
offered a bribe. Garina, in a telephone interview in late June from
Kiev, said, "Someone came up to me and offered me $500 to lose the bout
to Elaine Cheris. I refused."
Marx wrote to the USFA shortly after the Garina-Cheris match, detailing
the allegations. "It makes you want to throw up, thinking there's a
possibility of American involvement in anything like that," she says.
"It makes you sad. Or angry."
The USFA asked FIE vice president Chaba Pallaghy to investigate,
although Pallaghy says, "The word investigation is a little strong."
Pallaghy says he made inquiries of "a private nature," speaking to five
or six "people who would know what's going on internationally. These
people had not heard anything. It seems Garina was sort of embarrassed
to lose to a 50-year-old lady. The whole thing is based on rumor as far
as we're concerned." The USFA never asked Pallaghy to write a report; he
passed on his findings in a teleconference.
But some unconvinced U.S. coaches and fencers wanted something in black
and white. Two American coaches had a lawyer draft a statement alleging
a bribe, which was presented to Garina. She declined to sign it. But a
U.S. coach from the former Soviet Union has a second letter affirming
the bribe attempt, one that Garina says she wrote and signed. He won't
release the letter, however, until he receives a $5,000
"indemnification" payment, which he says he will pass on to Garina and
her father. "If this story were to come out of Ukraine, it would close
off international competition to her," the coach says. "Her father wants
to protect her by buying a small apartment, by sending her to college."
But the Americans interested in pursuing the allegations will not pay.
"That would have amounted to paying for evidence," says Eric Rosenberg,
coach of Sharon Monplaisir, who failed to earn one of the three women's
Olympic épée spots. "That would be like bribing a statement out of her."
Sam Cheris, Elaine's husband and the outgoing chairman of the USFA
international committee, says the only green involved in this mess is
envy. Sam says some fencers and their coaches are carrying on a vendetta
against Elaine, a 1988 Olympian in foil who returned to competition this
season after shoulder surgery. "There is a vicious group of girls who
will say anything to get Elaine off the team," says Sam, a Denver
lawyer. "They say, 'She's an old lady. She doesn't belong.'"
Said George Kolombatovich, chairman of the USFA officials commission, "I
know all the fencers, and I can tell you that they didn't band together
in any sort of conspiracy."
Even before the current controversy, the Cherises were far from popular.
When Nhi Lan Le, the No. 3 American woman épée fencer, asked to borrow a
spare blade at a tournament in Katowice, Poland, Le says Elaine told
her, "Sorry, even if you were my mother, the answer is no." Le borrowed
the blade from a Spanish fencer. At a World Cup meet in Luxembourg a
month after Tauberbischofsheim, Elaine plopped her fencing bag down next
to her teammates. Two of them picked up their bags and moved. When Le
shared a suite with Elaine at a South Carolina training camp before the
Olympics, she says she did not exchange a word with her roommate. But
she says the allegations are not based on personal dislike. "This is
definitely not a plot," says Le. "This is not something where we're out
to get her."
Cheris, Le and Marx, Olympic teammates by passport if not in spirit, all
fenced Sunday and no, they did not turn their blades on each other.
Cheris rallied to tie a former world champion from Italy named Laura
Chiesa in the final minute of their first-round épée bout, but then she
made a mad, headlong rush and was touched on her shoulder, a mistake of
youthful impetuousness from a woman who has lived half a century. In the
stands the Cherises' son, Zachariah, a seven-year-old with rain clouds
for eyes, buried his head in his hands, a mirror image of his doleful
mother, who sat on the fencing strip and wondered how two years of her
life could be undone in three seconds by a tactical error that left her
a 15-13 loser. Her bout had ended, but the controversy that has dogged
her for four months lingers. Moments after she had fenced, her little
boy handed her a red rose; later, Elaine Cheris said, "He told me, 'I
still love you, even though you lost.'"
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