Craig’s Fencing Blog

Nike launched the new Nike Ballestra shoe today on their online store.

The shoe retails for $220.00, making it just about the highest priced fencing shoe on the market. The Adidas adiStar shoe launched this past week at between $200 and $240 at various retailers and the D’Artagnan III (which to us looks like the Lightster, but we’re not sure) at $115.

The Ballestra comes in three color schemes, including Granbassi’s Grey/Pink setup. If you get them, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

I just uploaded a new podcast to iTunes (look for the fencing podcast there) and also embedded the audio to the news story on the front page of Fencing.Net.

Recently I purchased Dragon Naturally Speaking to assist in getting transcriptions of podcasts done so that there would be a text record for those that prefer to print out and read the interview. Dragon has the ability to import .wav files and attempt to transcribe them. I wondered how it would do with an interview vs. a dictation and the results were not very pretty.

The audio is over here: Tim Morehouse interview

Continue Reading »

Keeth and Erinn Smart made the list of “Top 100 Olympians to Watch” by Time Magazine.

The city slickers of the sport, the brother/sister duo from Brooklyn trained at a New York City fencing school that groomed inner-city youth in this elite European sport. Keeth, who became the first U.S. fencer to gain the No. 1 ranking, is back for his third shot at a medal in saber; Erinn fenced in Athens. They’ve had a heart-breaking year: in May their mother, Liz, died after a two year battle with colon cancer, on the heels of their father’s 2005 passing from a sudden heart attack.

French epeeist Laura Flessel-Colovic comes in at #30 on the list.

Just posted the newest article from Dr. John Heil who does a lot of Sport Psychology work with the US Fencing Association on a volunteer basis along with sport psychology consulting. He will be contributing more articles with Fencing.Net in the coming months.

To understand a sport, one must come to know the game - its rules and regulations, its competitors and its customs. But to fully appreciate the Olympics, it is essential to not only understand the game itself, but also the private “inner game” of the athlete and the public spectacle of the Olympics’ “outer game.”

Continue Reading »

For several months now I’ve been schooling local parents on the options that they have for fencing shoes. You can go with the high end shoes (we carry the Leon Paul / Hi-Tec Blades and Scimitars in our showroom) or you can go with the cheaper fencing shoes but you can also go with a shoe that is made for a different or larger market that incorporates many of the features you need for fencing.

Of the “non-fencing” shoes that are best for the purpose, the shoes made for squash and badminton work out the best because they are made to support the foot for the lunging motions and side to side movements demanded of a match.

Continue Reading »