Silence is complicity! A call to journalists and officials to fight against corruption in fencing
Off the record, fencers and officials complain; publicly, they claim resistance is "too risky". Two YouTubers exposing the sport's existential crisis challenge this culture of cowardly indifference. Marius Dobel-Ober issues a rallying cry: there is no neutral ground when dealing with autocrats.
"We do not have the luxury of a neutral choice.
Either we oppose corruption or we enable it."
As a boy, I had a rather idealised view of journalists. I grew up reading Franco-Belgian comics, where the heroes consisted of brave reporters investigating villains, exposing and foiling their dastardly schemes. I would watch Christopher Reeves’s Superman split his time between saving the world and pursuing a journalistic career at The Daily Planet. It is no wonder then, that when I realised that my world was in danger, I would call upon journalists to help save it.
My world in this case being the sport of fencing.
I started my YouTube channel Slicer Sabre in 2017, from a place of great dissatisfaction. Frustrated by the lack of media coverage of the sport, I set out to address the issue myself.
I was, and maybe still am, a nobody. A mediocre fencer from a fencing desert. I wasn’t particularly well connected at a national level, never mind at an international level. An outsider peering through the back window, desperate to know what was going on inside. I would scour the internet for nuggets of information, and would do my best to put together the pieces into a somewhat coherent story.
Eventually, I would begin conducting my own interviews, and building a network of well-connected people who would help me stay informed. With as little as a polite knock, doors began to open for me.
One of the first signs that my work could reach wider audiences came when one of my videos was featured on the Fox News website. I realised this when the comments section became flooded with overtly racist remarks, so many that I had little choice but to turn off the comments section in its entirety. The video centred on an African-American fencer whose reckless actions had resulted in the disqualification of the American team. This episode made it clear to me that when the mainstream media does cover our sport, it won’t always be for the right reasons.
Nevertheless, it was to the large publications that I turned to, when in the run-up to the 2024 Summer Olympics, it became apparent that the sport was, and still is, facing an existential threat.
The villains in this story are as cartoonish as the ones in my childhood comics: a toad-faced oligarch with his reptilian lackey; a jovial referee with his bumbling idiot of a henchman; a bratty rich kid with his mafioso enforcer of a coach.
Jens Weinreich
The brazenness of their misdeeds and their shameless arrogance would make any fictional antagonist blush. Maybe it is excusable then, that I hoped to find equally cartoonish heroes- selfless, hard working people who fight for truth and justice.
I reached out to journalists, as many as I could.
Most ignored me.
Some replied with a few questions, and maybe even published a tepid article.
With only a couple of notable exceptions, almost none of the journalists I encountered were interested in doing any work on this story; any information had to be served up for them on a platter, and they certainly weren’t going to dig for any themselves.
