Dressed in all-white protective gear and wearing a mask, Chris Hoffmann lunged forward. When his blade made contact with his partner, a green light flashed and a shrill bell sounded inside Catonsville's Academies of Fencing in Baltimore practice gym.
Hoffmann, 45, of Baltimore, had quit fencing after graduating from Princeton while he spent three years in Africa. But after a 20-year hiatus from a sport he had been involved with since junior high school, he got back into it. And with next weekend's Richard F. Oles Charm City Classic nearing, the Johns Hopkins Hospital assistant professor of medicine makes sure to practice, even during his medical research trips to South Africa.
"It took a while to get back into fencing because I was fencing at a very high level in college, and to just come do what I'm doing now would have been frustrating," said Hoffmann, who practices two days a week and works on his footwork and running another three days a week.
Fencers have three choices of weapons: foil, saber and epee. Hoffmann will be competing in epee (pronounced EPP-pay), the heaviest of the blades, in the Charm City Classic, held Saturday and Sunday at UMBC. He said that because epee fencers can aim for the whole body, they are more likely to try to plan moves ahead rather than simply reacting to opponents' attacks.
"With epee, you tend to … need a little more patience and focus," Hoffmann said. "When I played in college, I would plan all five moves out in advance. … It has to be instinctive but yet a process of what you want to get to."
Robert Dickens, 20, of Mount Airy will be competing in foil. With the lightest of the three blades, he will be able to hit opponents only in the torso. As with saber, opponents have "right of way," meaning they take turns making moves in fast-paced sword swinging. Lights and buzzers indicate when one opponent's blade, which is hooked to wires that go under the participant's gloves and shirt and that attach to a pulley on the ceiling, strikes an opponent. But a referee oversees who gets the point if both buzzers go off simultaneously.
"Foil is a little bit more traditionally focused on the actions and doing things technically proper, because we have right of way," Dickens said. "We have a referee who decides whether our action is right enough that we can be awarded a point for it."
Micah Wilson, 17, of Westminster also will be competing in foil, though he used to use saber, which he called the "roughest and toughest" of the weapons. The roots of saber fencing date to cavalry fighters, who tried to avoid hitting other horses while on horseback, and modern wielders, unsurprisingly, can hit each other only above the waist.
"You get points by being in the right distance and the right direction at the right time," he said. "A lot of people watching fencing for the first time watch the swords, but the points come from the feet."
Michael Oles, treasurer of the Maryland division of USA Fencing and manager of the Academy of Fencing, said the sport requires a great deal of intellect, regardless of weapon.
"When fencing, and someone is trying to stab you, you're really paying attention, and it's intense," said Oles, a nephew of the late Richard Oles, for whom the tournament is named. "It's like playing chess with someone physically."
The first day of the Charm City Classic will feature men's epee and women's foil and saber, while the second day will hold competitions for men's foil and saber and women's epee.
All of the approximately 300 contestants Oles expects will be ranked before the tournament, then split into groups of six or seven based on their rankings. The first set will be round-robin-style; contestants will face each participant in their group, and bouts end when one is hit five times.
Points from the first round will determine rankings for the second round, a bracket-style elimination format. Competitors will spar for three minutes, or until one player reaches 15 points.
The tournament is a Regional Open Circuit, meaning contestants will have the chance to earn points that can place them into Division IA, which puts them on track for Olympic qualifying.
Wilson has qualified for the Junior Olympics for the past three years but did not attend the last tournament because he was traveling. He has been fencing since he was 8 years old, when his parents wanted to turn his obsession with toy "Star Wars" lightsabers into a more productive pastime.
Wilson is one of two left-handers in his club, and he said it gives him an advantage.
"You're on that other side, and they don't think about covering that side," he said. "They're used to paring on the other side."
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