By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  I felt this harsh and thought back to the times I had watched Beck giving his pupils warm-up lessons in world championships or Olympics—of his having Alex Pusch lunge at him again and again and again, hitting him in a veritable Blitzkrieg, so fast and unremitting a barrage that it seemed irresistible.

  Schmitt soon drew attention to himself because, on his father’s advice, he had turned down a club Mercedes and the chance to borrow money free of interest. “So I didn’t owe him anything. It was then that I started to fight with Beck—not because I wanted to, but because I had to.” One day in 1985 he was called into Beck’s office. “Why don’t you want my help?” the coach asked, listing everything that Schmitt had turned down. Soon tears were running down Beck’s face as he plaintively urged the teenager to join his system, “to be a part of us.” By his account, Schmitt responded politely that he did not need more than he already had. Beck’s whole demeanor changed. “He got really angry. He pushed his head into mine and yelled, ‘I’m going to destroy you—you’re never going to become a champion. Never.’ ”

  The next thing Schmitt knew, all the fencers at the club—bar himself and his brother—were summoned by Beck and told that they should not talk to Schmitt: he was to be ostracized. Beck tried to make the other squad members believe that Schmitt had wanted more money from Beck (national junior team members were already at that time getting from non-Tauber sources 100 to 1,300 DM a month, depending on results) and that he had decided to kick him out as soon as his alternate training was over.

  Arnd Schmitt in March 2000. He was a fittingly heroic figure amid the morass of German—and international—squabbling during the 1980s and early 1990s. (illustration credit 20.2)

  The next few months were like something out of The Trial. Schmitt had many friends at Tauber, and these continued to talk to him; only as soon as they saw Beck or one of the other coaches approach they would abruptly turn their backs. Ulrich was too young to help much, and besides, his knee collapsed under the heavy training program, and after two operations he was forced to give up the sport. Arnd, not yet twenty-one, was on his own. He discovered that other fencers were being paid as much as 500 DM to beat him in important competitions. He had been granted a travel allowance of 300 DM a month but saw none of that money for two years. “Beck put all the money he received into one big pot and played God with it, distributing it as he saw fit.” If Beck thought he could break the young épéeist, he had chosen the wrong man: after leaving Tauber Schmitt would become the spokesman for the German union of fencers and would be appointed the representative for the entire German Olympic team, a post he held for eight years. He had an abundance of “Rückgrat”—backbone.

  At the end of 1986 Schmitt left Tauber for Bayer Leverkusen, at that time the third largest sports club in Germany, with ten thousand members. Because it was far more than a fencing club, with major nationally ranked teams in soccer, basketball, and boxing, Beck’s influence there was minimal. In September 1986 Schmitt hoped his results would be good enough to qualify him for the Masters’ competition, open to the top eight épéeists in the world. The venue was Tauber. All the sports media were to be there, and he crept in at eighth and final place. The event was by direct elimination, and in his first bout against the number one seed and current world No. 1, Alex Pusch, he won with something to spare. Next came the Italian champion, Angelo Mazzoni, whom he also beat. In the final match he was up against Eric Srecki of France, future Olympic gold medalist and twice world champion. Again, he triumphed. “I had won the Masters—in Tauber! It was the worst possible result for Beck. But it was only then that I saw that my fencing well wasn’t enough—I really had to defend myself against this guy.” But how could Schmitt, not even a national team member, take on one of the most powerful figures in German sport? In the end, Beck would take the fight to him.

  In the next Olympic year, 1988, competition for the German épée team was intense. At a top international event held north of Milan, a non-Tauber German fencer was scrambling to qualify out of a stiff pool when Schmitt’s old rival Mazzoni came up to tell him that one of the Tauber coaches (who had been Schmitt’s main teacher there) had approached him with an offer of money if he lost his fight against a Pole named Mariusz Stralka, a recent addition to the Tauber stable. This would have had the effect of eliminating the German fencer, possibly ending his hopes of qualifying for Seoul. “They’ve asked me,” said Mazzoni, “but I’m not going to do it.”*

  Schmitt reported this to the German Federation, but no one was interested. Eventually Mazzoni took the story to a sports journalist and listed a whole series of bribes that Tauber officials had made to foreign fencers. Eastern European fencers were being offered as much as 1,000 DM to throw a fight—a huge sum for them. The story first appeared in the leading Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Schmitt, approached for comment, was quoted as saying, “I can’t believe that Emil Beck doesn’t know what is going on.”

  Beck immediately sued for defamation—in an attempt, Schmitt believes, to gag him over the weeks leading up to Seoul. The president of the Italian federation, Renzo Nostini, informed Mazzoni that should he travel to Germany to testify on Schmitt’s behalf he would find himself removed from the national team. At first Schmitt was determined to fight, but he was persuaded to put the matter off till the Games were over. “After we had all agreed on this, some journalists wrote ‘Success for Beck,’ but that was absolute rubbish. After the Games, Beck dropped the case completely.”

  On the fencing strip, Schmitt’s progress continued, and he duly qualified for the German team. That July, a training camp was organized in Portugal, a chance to relax before the Games. Schmitt told the German Federation he couldn’t make it, as it clashed with his university exams, but that he would continue to train on his own, which he did, taking his coach and younger brother off to Majorca. At this point, one of the leading German officials, an ally of Beck, wrote to the federation, asking for Schmitt to be excluded from the Olympic team. The national sports press reported that without Schmitt Germany would jeopardize its chance of winning gold. The federation met and voted 7–1—in Schmitt’s favor.

  At Seoul, the entire German team had one of its worst Olympics, winning only two golds. One was in swimming. The other was in men’s épée, where Arnd Schmitt, only twenty-three and in his first Olympic final, was unstoppable. At the moment of his victory, TV cameras showed Beck with both hands over his face.

  “I can understand it all, in a way,” says Schmitt. “Tauber is the biggest fencing center in the world. To keep it running, you have to be successful. He couldn’t have someone like me outside the Tauber circle.” He looked over my shoulder for a moment, then added, “There is a German saying, ‘Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel.’—To achieve what you want you may do anything you want—but it’s meant ironically—no one agrees with that. Except Beck.”

  The Tauber coach may have felt chastened but he remained irrepressible—and was apparently out for revenge. The following year, at the international épée event in London, Schmitt made the final. Through the same official who had pressed to have Schmitt expelled, Beck asked for a certain referee to officiate Schmitt’s fight. The Englishman in charge, Keith Smith, was surprised but agreed. Come the bout, the chosen director gave decision after decision against Schmitt, but the German still won. And went on winning: he took the world cup for the first time in 1987, then the world title in 1999, marking him, with Alex Pusch, one of the two most successful épéeists in German history.

  Schmitt had agreed before our meeting in Bonn to talk for up to an hour. In the end we spoke for well over three. As the conversation went on, he continued to finger the brown file that lay between us. At last he picked it up and withdrew several sheets of paper. “These will show you that in Tauber it was an open secret that bouts, referees, and high officials were being bought.” I glanced at the pages—testimony after testimony of fencers and officials about illicit financial transactions. Some of those who had given information about B
eck’s dealings were just names; others were fencers I knew well and had come across in competition for years. I looked across at Schmitt. “I was sent it anonymously,” he said.

  Yet all this was going on at the same time that Tauber fencers continued to win medals at all levels, good work in the local community flourished, and handicapped and young people alike found in “TBB” a second home. Beck’s empire seemed too firmly established to be more than slightly embarrassed by Schmitt’s testimony. Beck was now in his mid-sixties but still ambitious. Then in 1999 a new story broke.

  Beck had become determined that when he retired his younger son, Rene, a fencing coach, would take over from him. However, Rene Beck is far from being a master of international standing and had little support at the club. Anyway, people mused, surely the succession would pass to Matthias Behr. Behr’s father had died in a car accident in 1959, and he was almost Beck’s adopted son. Not emotional like his mentor, Behr had a quiet way of doing things that has drawn people to him. His first marriage foundered under the weight of his commitment to fencing, but he had been married again, to a Tauber club mate and fellow Olympic gold medalist, Zita Funkenhauser, and only a week before the Olympics were due to start Zita had given birth to twins. There were complications, and Behr said he must stay behind. Beck said he would have to attend, but Behr stood firm. From that point on the relationship unraveled. As Schmitt put it, “Matthias realized that for years he had loyally cheated on Beck’s orders, and that he was wrong.”

  At the end of the 1990s results started to fall off, and other nations overtook Germany on the medals list; by 1996 the country that had been ranked third in the world had slipped to seventh place. Sponsorship fell away, and even loyal Mercedes-Benz questioned whether the huge wage bill could be justified. At the beginning of July Beck publicly attacked Behr and his other loyal lieutenant, Alex Pusch, in front of forty of their colleagues as “lazybones” with “the wrong attitude.” The same week the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that a group of senior fencers had asked Beck to resign. The reasons given were his offensive behavior and his authoritarian style of leadership. A younger successor was needed. The article sided with Behr, who said he had endured three years of persecution for his supposed “lack of commitment.” Pusch declared, “I want my dignity and reputation back.”

  From July 7 through to the end of the month, hardly a day passed without some major German newspaper story based on the troubles at Tauber. On the fifteenth the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that all parties had agreed to “bury the hatchet” and that a newfound team spirit prevailed; a week later one of the club’s world champions stormed out, saying that Pusch and Behr had been made scapegoats for Tauber’s current lack of success. Three days later the Stuttgarter Zeitung reported new accusations of financial fraud against Beck, who had moved into a flat intended for fencers.

  Beck’s handling of government subsidies was paraded mercilessly. Retired international fencers were due to receive some 300 DM each in public money every month as payment for acting as sparring partners for younger fencers. This money, it was claimed, Beck had retained and spent on his own priorities. He was referred to as “Emil Everywhere,” one of the most powerful men in the sports industry, holding more than ten posts in various associations and unions. Behr was reported not to want Beck’s job—his marriage was more important. And so it went on, the pride of Germany unraveling for all to see.

  Eventually Beck was fined just 25,000 DM, and his responsibilities were split up among a group of subordinates. A year later, when I interviewed him at the Tauber center, he had retired from his various posts and seemed to be functioning as a kind of professor emeritus. People treated him carefully, with an exaggerated respect, humoring him but still slightly afraid of the short, corpulent figure who had so recently wielded so much power: a dethroned Napoleon, wandering around his Elba. How was he spending his time? Improving his golf handicap, he said: at 28, it was too high. And there were his homing pigeons, a flock he had tended lovingly for years (a hobby he shares with another noted sportsman—Mike Tyson). I asked him whether, if he had his life over again, he would do anything differently—anything at all. No, he said, he wouldn’t change a thing.

  Shortly after my visit Beck was accused of syphoning off some 275,000 DM a year from various grants and subsidies he had been given to administer. At that time no one claimed he was using the money for personal gain; it was just that he had seemed to regard this money as his own, to distribute and spend as he saw fit. “It’s a tragedy—it’s the right word, yes?” said Behr, finally installed as the club’s manager. “But we can’t help him now.” No charges were ever filed against Tauber’s creator, whose death in 2006 attracted glowing obituaries.

  Beck was obviously an exceptional motivator, and his slant on teaching initiated a revolution. Maybe the lack of success in his final years—no gold at Sydney, just a couple of silvers and three bronzes—was an indictment of his championing hard work over technique; maybe the fencing world had simply become more competitive. But how had one man been able to corrupt a whole generation? German fencing glosses over Beck’s legacy, because to criticize his methods would be to call into question all those medals, those concrete achievements. “Germany isn’t a country that builds its self-image through its sporting successes,” Arnd Schmitt told me, but I wonder. People see in Beck the most successful master in the history of swordplay, and certainly the center he created in his hometown surpasses all other sports centers throughout the world, a stupendous achievement. What would I have done, had I been brought up in that system? Or if my twenty-five-year-old daughter Mary, who is now in the British épée team, but struggles to beat top Continental opposition, had been offered the chance of such world-class coaching from an early age? I thought of King Midas, even of the Struldbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels, but most of Faustus, bartering his soul for immortality:

  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

  And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough,

  That sometime grew within this learned man.

  WHAT WILL BE EMIL BECK’S LEGACY? WILL FENCING IN GERMANY and beyond be able to put its house in order? That Arnd Schmitt should emerge as an athlete of sufficient integrity to take on the Tauber system and sufficient character to triumph, and with such great skill that he could also become a world and Olympic champion is heartening, and it did force officials throughout Europe to rethink their priorities. “When someone as talented and driven as Emil Beck emerges, it’s hard not to give them near-total power,” commented one leading German official who is also high on the FIE. “But we’ve learned that the cost can be too high.” Even so, Beck’s disgrace did not immediately alter the way fencers acted. During the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, four Russian épéeists and the world saber champion, Viktor Kirienko, held a press conference to announce that they would not fight for their country in the team events unless their government honored its promise to pay them $1,500 each for the gold medals they had won at the 1991 world championships. In the end they did fence—but only after Boris Yeltsin himself had assured them that the money would be paid. The Russians were not unusual: the Italian team at those Games won $40,000 per gold medal; Germans can expect 30,000 DM for winning an Olympic gold medal. Most national teams are the same: the Hungarian fencers who did not go to Los Angeles in 1984 because of the boycott received thousands of forints in compensation. Nor is any of this new. The cheating virus has been present for at least forty years, during which period the sport has changed not only its ethos but also its technical character, and the two are interdependent. The electric box was introduced at the Berlin Games in 1936. Fencers, and coaches like Beck, quickly realized that the new system made formerly accepted techniques redundant—there was no need to look elegant when registering a hit was the only thing that counted. Everything in the sport focused on that machine: the tail wagged the dog. The laws of right of way and what constituted an attack, the basic vision of fencing introduced by the French i
n the eighteenth century, were flouted as fencing got faster and faster, and even the traditional differences among foil, épée, and saber began to erode. A top Soviet official, a General Popov, was quoted in the French magazine Escrime, coining the aphorism, “The symbolism of the action has been replaced by the reality of the touch.”

  In an attempt to make the sport suitable for television, the FIE has introduced see-through masks, colored clothing, and an elaborate qualifying formula for major championships. One is reminded of H. L. Mencken’s admonition “To every grave problem there is an answer that is simple, easy, and wrong.” But other changes are on the right tack. There is a move afoot to reduce the “blockage” time at foil and saber, to make it harder for fencers’ lights to go off together; to increase the contact time of the foil tip upon its target, to eliminate flick hits; to reduce the distance between the two en garde lines by a meter, making it harder to get a “run-up” to attacks; and, as has already and sadly happened with saber, to eliminate the flèche. No one wants to throw away the electric box, but such innovations could dilute its predominance. Ironically, these changes, if implemented, would help return fencing to classical modes—not because it would make for a more beautiful sport but because preelectric fencing was governed by what the human eye could take in. If people fence classically, it is easier for audiences to understand, and that could promote the sponsorship and TV coverage that fencing so desperately needs.

  In the late 1980s the FIE moved its main headquarters from Paris to Lausanne, seat of the International Olympic Committee. If this was an attempt to gain more say in the corridors of sporting power, it backfired. Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC’s dictatorial head, largely ignored the newly elected head of world fencing, the seventy-one-year-old businessman, René Roch, and made it clear that he wanted the Olympic fencing program streamlined—or the sport might be dropped from the Games altogether.†