With Bhavani Devi's Olympic entry, fencing hopes it is no longer neglected

“I want people to know my journey... how I got here,” C A Bhavani Devi says. She is talking about the tricolour faceguard she wore at the Olympics, while also subtly saying much more. India’s first fencer at the Olympics is an outlier, and in as much as hers is a story of triumph, it is also one of immense sacrifice, grit and personal ambition against all odds. “The Olympics is something you see on TV and only dream of being a part of,” she says. Except, this time she was on TV, while India’s fencers were in dreamland.

It was early morning when Bhavani took to the piste in Tokyo, and watching on from Bengaluru, Irom Deban Singh reminisced. In 1989, as a 19-year-old Thang-Ta dancer in Imphal, Deban was picked for a Sports Authority of India (SAI) Special Area Games initiative for a new sport that was to be introduced in India: Fencing.

“They picked athletes from two states, Kerala and Manipur,” Deban says. “Manipur has Thang-Ta and Kerala has Kalaripayattu. The government, for whatever reason, decided practitioners of these two would be selected to learn fencing.” Deban was part of the first batch of fencers trained at SAI Delhi, spending five years learning a sport none of his countrymen knew about.

Deban shifted to Bengaluru as a coach in 1995. For 26 years, employed by the State Department of Sport, he has coached young fencers (many of whom have been part of Indian teams). This summer he watched the sport he loves enter India’s mainstream.

Sagar Lagu, now head coach at SAI Thalassery in Kerala, was introduced to fencing at his local gym in Sangli, Maharashtra in 1999. A boxer’s son, Lagu, along with four school friends, was intrigued by its novelty and quickly signed up. “In those first days we didn’t know the head or tail of what we were doing,” he says.

Lagu went for the Nationals (held in Maharashtra the next year) and remembers learning technique, borrowing equipment and watching proper fencing for the first time at the event. And on July 26, he watched some more as one of his wards became the first Indian fencer at the Olympics.

Bhavani’s story will forever be etched in fencing folklore. It started in Chennai, with encouragement from a mother who didn’t have the opportunity to play sports. “My mother couldn’t even finish school,” Bhavani says. “She always wanted her kids to get the freedom and support she never had.” Scouted for her talent, Bhavani spent seven years at SAI Thalassery, sharing equipment and toiling in the sun outside, practising an indoor sport. Her talent was undeniable and the apathy, too.

“She could’ve made it to this stage much earlier, if people had been paying attention,” Lagu says.

In 2014, Bhavani won silver in the Under-23 Asian Championships in the Philippines — the first Indian to do so. It was a huge moment for Indian sport. A month prior she had been denied the opportunity to take part in the 2014 Asian Games after the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) refused to fund her travel and stay.

“It was an opportunity completely lost,” Lagu says. “Exposure to that kind of competition… it would’ve changed her career, fast-tracked it by years.”

The rejection, combined with a dip in confidence and a period where Lagu says “she started questioning her choice of sport”, meant Bhavani missed out on a chance to qualify for the Rio Olympics in 2016. The oversight and negligence seems to be past, but for young fencers is still very real.

Jyotika Dutta, 23, started fencing as a seven-year-old in Rohru, Himachal Pradesh, at the behest of a cousin who needed someone to spar with. Now regarded as one of the most exciting prospects in the country (Dutta reached the quarterfinals at the 2018 Asian Games in the épée), she trains at the National Institute of Sports (NIS) in Patiala and is enrolled for a Bachelors in Physical Education from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. “In any case, we would get to attend maybe two international tournaments a year,” she says. “And now, after the pandemic, that has also gone.”

After the 2018 Asian Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sponsored a group of fencers to go and train at the International Fencing Federation’s (FIE) high-performance centre in France and then in Hungary for five months. Dutta was part of the selected few, and the experience saw her rise 16 places in the world rankings. “Now that Bhavani didi has gone to the Olympics, support for us may increase,” Dutta says. “But I believe it’ll take time.”

Lagu sees this as the moment when the authorities can change Indian fencing forever. “Fencing is perfect for Indians. It is a combat sport based on tactics and technique. It doesn’t require you to be physically dominant, and strength doesn't really matter,” he says. To do that, the path is simple. Fencers need to be allowed to practise fencing.

“Internationally, we get very little exposure,” he says. “And if we don’t participate in enough events, our rankings drop and we can’t qualify for others.” Young fencers have very few competitions to participate in even at home. Dutta, who won gold in épée at the inaugural Khelo India University Games, expressed happiness that there was one more avenue (aside from the Nationals) where she could get competition exposure. Lagu says it isn’t enough.

“We’d petitioned the Khelo India organising committee to include fencing as part of the Youth Games, too, and they said they’d do it in the next edition,” he says. But it's not there on the list for the next edition (delayed to 2022, in Haryana), he adds. “We hope Bhavani’s success can inspire investment.”

Deban reckons things are looking up. “Over the last week, I’ve had 10 parents call me asking how to get kids enrolled. I’ve talked more about fencing in a week than I have in a decade.”

The price of sparring

Fencing equipment is expensive and hard to come by. A sabre can cost between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 and a blade, which costs approximately Rs 9,000, lasts about a couple of years. Lagu remembers a time when he would run back and forth between venues, transferring equipment between different fencers to ensure they could compete. Bhavani, sponsored by the GoSports Foundation, travelled to train in Livorno, Italy, under coach Nicola Zanotti. But it’s a rare occurrence.