By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  “Since I had already made a summary check on the piste of his épée before he fenced Parker, it was clear, as he must have realized, that I was going to proceed to examine his sword more rigorously. Anyway, he pretended not to understand what I was saying and hurried to the end of the piste, where his companions had already brought out another épée to exchange with his own. I ran up to him and stopped this happening and ordered them to give me the correct weapon—which I made sure I had not lost sight of at any time. The Russians protested that the weapon which Onishenko had been using was not the one I indicated, but the other which they had produced. I replied that I was sure it was the first weapon and that that was the one I intended to confiscate. There was a slight argument, after which I took possession of the épée and sent for one of the FIE controllers.”

  Moment of truth: Boris Onishenko (left) attacks Jim Fox of Great Britain during their 1976 pentathlon match, but Fox jumps back, out of range. Yet the light for a valid hit comes on. (illustration credit 19.2)

  A French FIE official arrived and agreed that the weapon in question should be taken to Control. Onishenko was later to argue that the rigged épée was not his, despite the fact that it was made for a left-hander and the rest of the Soviet team, reserve included, were right-handed. Even now there is confusion over the exact nature of his épée. The organizers describe it in their report as a pistol grip; Fox is convinced it was a French handle. “Anyway,” he says, “it was bent round slightly, with a protrusion placed behind the forefinger which his finger could touch as it slid back.” But even that was not immediately clear. After the French official had had his say, a senior Hungarian, Tibor Szekely, himself a onetime international épéeist, arrived on the piste carrying Onishenko’s épée and a testing kit. Together he and Malacarne ran over the weapon’s various parts.

  “The point was correct,” says Malacarne. “So were the blade and coquille, while inside the coquille the two wires were in place and perfectly legal. But the wires, covered by the insulating plastic, showed two distinct breaks in the insulation, and these seemed to connect if one pressed one’s fingers against the coquille. Certainly the wires touched, if not every time then a number of times for both of us. The question I asked Tibor Szekely was ‘Could this break in the plastic insulation have been deliberate—with a knife or razor?’ (For I was certain that the hit which had come up on the lights had never arrived on the target.) Szekely’s answer was no, it was not possible to prove that the break had been made maliciously. At that point I had no alternative but to confirm that the hit had been annulled and to give Onishenko an official warning—which, should a faulty hit be repeated, would become a ten-point penalty.”

  Watching all this from high in the stands was the then head of British fencing, Mary Glen Haig. With her was Nicholas Bacon, the twelve-year-old son of friends who was suffering from a brain tumor (of which he would die four years later). He had been brought to the Olympics before his next bout of surgery. Nicholas been observing Onishenko keenly and, jumping up and down with indignation, insisted that the Ukrainian was cheating. Glen Haig, who was also a member of the IOC committee and always a formidable presence, made her way down to the fencing area and told a third official, Carl Schwende, the chief of discipline for the fencing event, that a warning and confiscation were not enough.

  Schwende replied that it could not be proven that Onishenko’s épée had been deliberately tampered with. Spurred on by Glen Haig, the British team put in an official protest, claiming that the evidence pointed overwhelmingly to dishonest alterations, for which the penalty was disqualification. All this took place within fifteen minutes of the first challenge.

  After long discussion, the FIE decided that Onishenko’s épée should be taken apart. Only then did they discover the full extent of the “engineering”—that the handle had a hole bored through it, and that it had been fitted with two extra wires, leading to a small metal disc, which, when pressed, produced a contact, and thus a hit, at will. The whole was encased in a tight-fitting chamois leather cover. “[It] was camouflaged to perfection,” says Malacarne. “But for the reluctance of the Soviet team to hand over the weapon, the incident might have had a completely different outcome. The apparently small defect of the two wires would have earned only an official warning—as at first it did—and might have prevented any more thorough examination.”

  “There was no joy in it for me,” says Jim Fox. “Boris was fencing brilliantly—there’s no doubt about it, he was a great fencer. After the incident he came up to me and said, ‘Jim, I’m so sorry about all this,’ and I said, ‘That’s all right, Boris.’ We then both went off to our respective pistes to fence new countries.” Back in 1972, when Onishenko had finished second, Fox had come in fourth, losing to him in the fencing. ‘I ended just twenty-four points behind him, which a fencing victory over him would have reversed. If he was already cheating, then he did me out of a medal.”

  Could Onishenko have fooled the international fencing community for that long? The then president of the World Pentathlon Association reckoned that he had been cheating for two years, but others are doubtful. “It is very hard to believe Onishenko had been using the weapon before,” says Michael Proudfoot, the British manager, “simply because he was so easily found out.… The Russians—including Onishenko—came to London for a pentathlon international in April that year, and we videotaped nearly all their fights. I have studied the film in great detail since and cannot find any evidence of doubtful hits. But then again it is difficult, because you really need the box or light and the épées simultaneously on video.”

  There remain two mysteries. One of the other officials at the match was Patrick Vajda, among the best referees in the world and a relaxed observer of the fencing scene. We have spoken at length about what happened in Montreal, but I was not expecting what he told me one day in his Paris insurance offices in early 2000: that he was convinced that Onishenko himself had been innocent and that the Russian coach and manager had engineered the scam. I find that too much to swallow. How could Onishenko not have known that he was using a rigged épée? It may seem implausible, but Carl Schwende agrees with Vajda. “After we disqualified him, I walked out of the committee room with Onishenko,” he explained. “He said to me, in German, ‘It’s not me. You know me.’ I really think it’s most difficult to establish what procedure was followed and who the guilty party was and who the victim. The incredible part of all this is that Onishenko did not need this kind of trick to win. He could easily have done very well without it.”

  This seems almost determinedly unjudgmental. After Montreal, Onishenko had been due to become coach of the Soviet pentathlon team and to be promoted to lieutenant colonel. He must have been keen to go out with a bang—which could only mean winning the individual gold. To quote the generous opinion of Jim Fox, “The pressure to be top … was so great you can almost forgive anyone for doing anything.”12

  Mark Rakita, the Russian world saber champion of 1967, was a close friend of Onishenko. “Psychologically I can understand it,” he told me. “He wanted to finish at number one, end things cleanly. His dream was to win the Olympics. He had also undergone being persecuted for being too old. The policy then was to get rid of the old-timers, and after 1972 people wanted him out. But he was a good guy as well as being a friend of mine, and I still don’t know why he did it. How could he live with himself, even had he got away with it?”b

  Sandy Kerekes, a Hungarian-born sabreur and pentathlete who has lived in Canada since 1950, was the overall competition director for the pentathlon back in 1972. He believes that the Soviet team coach may have forced their key fencer to act as he did. The manager, Oleg Chuvilin, was a popular character, unlikely to have been part of so gross a plot, but the coach, Fleischman, was a shadowy figure who had suddenly appeared as a fencing master in 1972 and disappeared as quickly after the Games were over. “Onishenko may have been the hand that pulled the trigger, but did he have a wife or children? Might he have been ope
n to blackmail on other counts? Who knows what pressures he was under or what he was told to do?” Kerekes adds that Chuvilin had enemies in Moscow and had survived an assassination attempt. “But Chuvilin would deny everything about Onishenko. They just wanted to take care of it themselves.”

  In any event, only one man was punished. Onishenko was unceremoniously ushered back to the Soviet team ship anchored in the Saint Lawrence River. No other Russian épées were found to have been tampered with, and the organizers’ fear that the Russians might walk out en bloc, followed by other Eastern European countries, was not realized. The offense was presented as the crime of a single individual: Onishenko returned home to be stripped of his medals and discharged from the army, and his salary as a top-class athlete was cut off. But his uncle was the secretary of the Ukrainian branch of the CPSU. Within a year he was managing a large swimming complex in Kiev, then was made director of the Central Republican Sports Stadium—with a capacity of 100,000, the largest in the Ukraine.

  Bizarrely, I was told by several leading fencers that around 1991 Onishenko was found drowned in the swimming pool he had once administered. The rumor spread that he had been killed by the KGB, though from what motive nobody knew. Yet Ukrainians based in New York say they have spoken to him within the last three years, one of them face-to-face. A BBC team making a radio program at the end of 2000 believed that it dealt with him on the phone. Or was it someone impersonating him? “Onishenko” told them that his life was fine; he was sixty-three, and had a twelve-year-old granddaughter; only she wasn’t interested in fencing, she preferred mathematics. Game theory, perhaps.

  At the time, Soviet officials insisted that Onishenko was a one-off case; no one should think that some great cheating strategy was afoot. It is true that since 1976 the combine has almost died out, but other ways of skirting the rules have replaced it. Highly competitive people will always push regulations to the limits in any sport. The FIE has enacted endless new rules to ensure the sport’s good name: tantrums are now penalized heavily, talking to referees is strictly regulated, and referees themselves are heavily scrutinized. At the 2000 Sydney Games the organizers invited a roster of thirty referees, drawn from officials worldwide; fifteen were never used. However, special interests still proliferate.

  Boris Onishenko during the Montreal fencing event. (illustration credit 19.3)

  Just before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics the head of world fencing, the Frenchman René Roch, was asked by an IOC official to confirm that the current rulebook was the one to be used at the Games. “Yes,” he affirmed. His questioner went on, “There are six hundred or so rules in your book, M. Roch—75 to 80 percent of them measures against cheating. Does your sport have a problem?”

  At the first classical Olympics, competitors were flogged for cheating and wrestlers were called “lions” for their addiction to (illegal) biting. The origins of boxing, racing, and athletics are, to quote a London Times editorial, “sunk in a mire of gaming and cheating.”13 In the United States, it is an accepted dictum of Nascar racing that “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” But dishonesty is particularly shocking in fencing, because of its history. “Perhaps sporting heroes are especially vulnerable,” one commentator mused, “because a champion’s will to win is an impulse close to greed. Supreme athleticism does not always leave room for moderation or common sense.”

  * Epée was always intended to reflect the conditions of a duel, so bouts were initially fought for one hit, as they still are in the pentathlon. The number of hits increased over the years, until in the 1950s it was set at five, as with foil and saber. This offended the purists, especially when a fencer finished a bout with a double hit—that is, when both épéeists land at the same moment, each thus scoring on the other. Such hits, in the words of one critic, “twisted the game into the opposite it was intended for.”4 When, at the 1948 Olympics, one third of the hits in the final (of six) were doubles, one master grieved, “Epée fencing might just as well never have been thought of.” By 1960 the time interval between hits, which the first boxes had been able to judge to one fifteenth of a second, had been reduced to one twenty-fifth.

  † Drink is another matter. The 1965 épée world champion, Zoltán Nemere of Hungary, was so fond of the bottle that he lost his driving license, then a year later was involved in a car accident, for which he was jailed. The year after that, he received a special parole to attend the world championship. Two years later, in the very first bout of the épée team final at the Mexico Games, the Russian Gregori Kriss took advantage of the freshly introduced doping controls to complain that Nemere stank of alcohol. The Hungarian manager, Béla Bay, was asked if he would accept official testing of his fencer. Bay said he would, on condition that all the fencers be so tested. The protest was withdrawn.

  The sad postscript came early in 2001, when Nemere was killed in a car crash, driving home late one night from a friend’s wedding. He had not been drinking.

  ‡ At the championships, the FIE doctor was the Hungarian Jenö Kamuti; had Lamour been suspended, the saber title would have gone to the silver medalist—a Hungarian. At the time some of his fellow countrymen murmured that Kamuti had bent the findings so that Lamour was cleared, since Kamuti, a contender in the FIE presidential election, due a few months later, needed French votes to win. But Kamuti has a reputation as an honest man, and his version is convincing: “It was the first year that caffeine had been on the list of forbidden drugs, and laboratories were not sufficiently prepared. As it was, there were four different samples. The first showed up so positive it was impossible for anyone to have taken in that amount; the second showed up negative; the third didn’t work; and the fourth was on the limit. So my decision was an easy one.”

  § Other nations register their feelings differently. During the 1971 world championships Hungary met Sweden in the épée team final. The match was close and hard fought, with the Swedish manager, the Hungarian-born Béla Rerrich, constantly leaping up to protest. On one of these occasions his complaint required an official inquiry (jury d’appel), leaving audience as well as competitors waiting. The Hungarian épéeist involved, Csaba Fenyvesi, eventually got down from the raised piste, picked up a table, and told his three colleagues to bring chairs. Soon the four were busily playing cards. The audience burst out laughing at a sight unprecedented in fencing, let alone at a world final. Time passed, and still the officials were debating in some upstairs room. Eventually the leading Swedish épéeist, Rolf Edling, went up to the Hungarian foursome, looked over each player’s hand, and asked if he could join in. The official complaint became irrelevant, and the match soon resumed.

  ‖ What are the limits of what is honorable and dishonorable? As one seasoned foil international said to me, “If everyone else is doing it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don’t.” Competitors become hardened and determined not to give anything away. In a key team match in 1978, against a Cuban fondly known as “The Truck,” I was denied a hit I had undoubtedly made but my opponent acknowledged it, reversing the decision so that the touch was recorded. Later in the bout, on the deciding hit, he made a valid riposte and looked to me to acknowledge it. I said nothing. “Ah well,” he said, “so much for honor.” I felt ashamed.

  However, four years later, in the European championship, I was fencing a Spaniard. When he made an attack at my head that I thought got through my parry, I was surprised when both judges—this being in the days before electric saber—said that I had parried. I raised my hand, and the hit was recorded against me. I felt that “The Truck” might have nodded in approval. Later in the bout, almost the same hit was made in reverse; this time the Spaniard stood his ground. At the end of the fight one of the side judges, a coach with the Polish team, said to me in his all-too-clear English, “This is an international tournament: you don’t acknowledge hits, and you don’t expect others to, because they won’t. And by the way, you were wrong—you did parry his attack; it was his renewed attack that hit you.”


  a Gorokhova was also well known for her backhand parry. Even her teammates looked askance at this—“she fences with two hands,” they’d joke sourly—but her coach was a high-ranking KGB officer with wide-ranging influence within fencing, so she was inviolate. A couple of months before the championships, she was quoted in a leading Russian sports magazine as saying, “Sport teaches us to be alert and brave.” Her many rivals must have laughed. At the beginning of one world final an Italian, the beautiful if tempestuous Vannetta Masciotta, got up on the piste and hissed, “Drop dead!” Gorokhova replied, “You first!”

  b Rakita also told me that, so far as the sabreurs were concerned, the Russians did not cheat because they had no need to—they were confident that they were better than anybody else. This certainly had seemed to be true, but then he told me about how he had taken part in a combine. I also recall Zbigniew Czajkowski’s memories of his days in Moscow in the early 1950s, when the Russians were cheating “like mad!” After a while the cheating was so blatant that he took off his mask and smiled. One of the Russian officials asked him why. He explained that it was his reaction to the constant dishonesty. The official disregarded this and simply snapped, “Smiling is not allowed.”